IBM PC DOS

IBM PC DOS (Acronym for International Business Machines Corporation Personal Computer Disk Operating System) was an operating system for the IBM Personal Computer, manufactured and sold by IBM from the 1980s to the 2000s. Before version 6.1, PC DOS was an IBM-branded version of MS-DOS. For versions 6.1 and later, development diverged and PC DOS became an independent product.

History

The IBM task force assembled to develop the PC decided that critical components of the machine, including the operating system, would come from outside vendors. This radical break from company tradition of in-house development was one of the key decisions that made the IBM PC an industry standard. But it was done out of necessity, to save time. Microsoft was eventually selected for the operating system.

IBM wanted Microsoft to retain ownership of whatever software it developed, and wanted nothing to do with helping Microsoft, other than making suggestions from afar. According to task force member Jack Sams, "The reasons were internal. We had a terrible problem being sued by people claiming we had stolen their stuff. It could be horribly expensive for us to have our programmers look at code that belonged to someone else because they would then come back and say we stole it and made all this money. We had lost a series of suits on this, and so we didn't want to have a product which was clearly someone else's product worked on by IBM people. We went to Microsoft on the proposition that we wanted this to be their product."