Microsoft’s Disk Operating System

CS-550-1: Operating Systems

Fall 2003
Dominic Swayne
 Table of Contents

An Overview: ................................................................................................................................................................................... 1

History and design environment .................................................................................................. 1

Success by Design ....................................................................................................................... 1
Easy to translate
Speed and efficiency
Written in Assembly Language
Advancing the state-of-the-art ..................................................................................................... 2
Limitations ................................................................................................................................... 2

The Structures of MS-DOS ............................................................................................................................................................ 2

Internal Structure of DOS ............................................................................................................ 2

The Basic Input/Output System (BIOS)................................................................................... 2
The DOS kernel........................................................................................................................ 3
The Command Processor ......................................................................................................... 3
Resident and transient ............................................................................................................. 3

Memory management. .................................................................................................................................................................... 4

The System Memory. ................................................................................................................................................................ 4
Interrupt Vectors ................................................................................................................................................................... 4
DOS kernel............................................................................................................................................................................ 4
High memory ......................................................................................................................................................................... 4
Expanded Memory ..................................................................................................................................................................... 4

Discrimination and behavior characteristics by program type. .......................................................................................... 4

Dynamic allocation............................................................................................................................................................... 5
Recognized native file types............................................................................................................................................... 5

Me mory Blocks ......................................................................................................................................................................... 5

Processor Modes and Memory. ..................................................................................................................................................... 6

Real Mode .................................................................................................................................................................................. 6
Protected Mode.......................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 6

Bibliography.....................................................................................................................................................................................7
An Overview:

History and design environment. Microsoft’s Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) was one of
several operating systems developed in the early 1980s to support the commercial release of 16-
bit personal computers. The purpose of this paper is to explore Microsoft’s Disk Operating
System, describe some of the important aspects of the software, and develop a better
understanding of the software.

First known as 86-DOS, it was developed in about 6 weeks by Tim Paterson of Seattle
Computer Products (SCP). The OS was designed to operate on the company’s own 16-bit
personal computers running the Intel 8086 microprocessor. (Paterson, 1983a)

When 86-DOS was developed, Digital Research’s Control Program for Microcomputers
(CP/M-80) was the operating system most commonly in use for 8-bit personal computers.
(Flynn, McHoes, 1996) CP/M-80 was supported by a wide range of application software.
Although developed for the new 16-bit environment of the PC, Paterson designed 86-DOS so
that it was very similar to the 8-bit CP/M-80. Using translation rules published by Intel, it was
relatively easy to port existing application programs to 86-DOS.

International Business Machines (IBM) was working on the hardware design for their
entrance to the personal computer market using Intel’s 8086 processor. Searching for an
operating system to support their new product, IBM sought proposals from two of the leading OS
software companies at the time: Digital Research and Softech. (Flynn, McHoes, 1996) Wanting
to compete but lacking an operating system of their own, Microsoft worked out a licensing deal
with SCP, allowing Microsoft to market 86-DOS under the Microsoft name – paying a royalty
fee to SCP. In July of 1981, Microsoft purchased the rights to 86-DOS, renaming it MS-DOS.
Later that year IBM released its first PC with MS-DOS (called PC-DOS on the IBM machines)
as its primary operating system. (UNESCO, 1999)

Success by Design Paterson designed the operating system with three specific goals. First,
make it easy to translate existing applications designed for the CP/M-80 operating system and
running on the Z80 8-bit processor into applications that would run in 86-DOS on the 8086 16-
bit processor. Designing 86-DOS so that existing applications could easily be ported to it was
very significant to its commercial viability. However, what ultimately secured the commercial
viability of MS-DOS was IBM’s release of its first Personal Computer in the fa ll of 1981 –
shipping them with MS-DOS as the primary Original Equipment from the Manufacturer (OEM)
operating system. (Paterson, 1983a)

The second design goal is typical of most modern operating systems; speed and
efficiency. Paterson designed 86-DOS so that the maximum system memory would be available
to applications, minimized disk transfers, improved the speed of disk transfers, and decreased OS
compute time. (Paterson, 1983a)

The final design goal was that the OS be written in assembly language. This was a
practical matter rather than a philosophical decision. According to Paterson, “The only software

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development tools available to Seattle Computer at the time were an assembler that ran on the
Z80 under CP/M and a monitor/debugger that fit into a 2K-byte EPROM (erasable
programmable read-only memory). Both these tools had been developed in house.” (Paterson,
1983a)

The first version of DOS used by IBM was written in 4000 lines of assembly- language
source code and required 8k of memory. (Stallings, 1995)

From its start as Version 1.0 in 1981, MS-DOS underwent significant revisions until it
was ultimately retired as a separate product line in 1994 with the introduction of Windows 95
(though Windows still ran on top of DOS for several more versions of Windows). In 1989, DOS
accounted for 61 percent of the PC operating systems shipped worldwide and had an installed
base of over 45 million. DOS was running more personal computers than all other operating
systems combined. (Duncan et al., 1990)

Advancing the state-of-the-art. Though it was not elegant and didn’t employ any revolutionary
new concepts, Microsoft’s Disk Operating System advanced the adoption of technology in many
ways. MS-DOS was the first large-scale commercial operating system that functioned on the
new 16-bit Personal Computer hardware (Intel’s 8086 processor). It was the first general
purpose operating system designed to run on multiple hardware configurations of the personal
computer (running Intel's x86 family of processors). Finally, largely due to IBM’s endorsement,
MS-DOS created an industry standard for general-purpose operating systems. (Flynn, McHoes,
1996)

Limitations. By design, DOS is a simple operating system with backwards compatibility.

Therein lies one of its greatest weakness. DOS manages jobs from a single user, sequentially on
a single processor. The original version could address a maximum of 1MB of memory, user
programs were limited to 640k, and it did not support hard drives. Although its layered design,
covered in detail later, permitted DOS to grow beyond these initial limitations, it remained a 16-
bit operating system even though 32-bit hardware and the ability to change processor modes on
the fly (see EMS page 4) became widely available with the introduction of the Intel 386
processor.

The Structures of MS-DOS

Internal Structure of DOS. Designed in layers, the operating system has three essential
components: the BIOS module, the kernel, and the command processor.

The Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) is specific to each hardware system and is
provided by the hardware manufacturer. The BIOS contains drivers for the basic hardware: the
display, keyboard, line printer, clocks, and boot device, and is normally supplied by the hardware
manufacturer. The most primitive components of the BIOS, called the resident portion, is stored
in Read Only Memory (ROM) and loaded into main memory when the system is initialized.
Other device drivers are also loaded from the CONFIG.SYS file during initialization. The kernel
communicates with the device drivers through I/O request packets. These requests are translated

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into the correct command forms for the various hardware components by the drivers. (UNESCO,
1999)

The DOS kernel is the

intermediate
layer which provides mandatory
operating system services and
functions that are hardware
independent. These functions
include: file and record
management, memory management,
character device I/O, spawning
other programs, and access to the
real-time clock. (UNESCO, 1999)
Being hardware independent, the
MS-DOS kernel is nearly identical
on every system, regardless of the
manufacturer. The kernel is stored
on the disk in the MSDOS.SYS file, Figure 1. DOS modules. (UNESCO, 1999) Modified version of
which has hidden and system diagram
attributes. The kernel provides no
default error handling. It traps errors through a vector that must be set by the command
processor. (Paterson, 1983a)

The Command Processor provides the MS-DOS user interface. The processor is located
in the COMMAND.COM file. It displays the DOS prompt, accepts user input and executes the
functions in order. The command processor is also responsible for setting the vector traps and
providing error responses. While the kernel is required, proprietary and cannot be modified, the
standard command processor is not required. Any user or vendor can implement DOS with their
own command processor. A unique feature of the default command processor is that it is split
into two pieces known as transient and resident. While OEM MS-DOS’s command processor
behaves this way, this is not a “necessary” feature and is not implement by some vendors
choosing to implement their own command processor. (Paterson, 1983a)

As the name implies, the resident portion is the critical section that remains resident in
main memory at all times. The resident portion is loaded into the low memory area just above
the kernel.

The transient portion is primarily responsible for interpreting user commands. It is

loaded into high memory where, if necessary, it can be overlaid by application programs. With
newer versions of DOS installed on systems with more memory, this feature is not as important
since main memory sizes have increased significantly and later versions of DOS are able to
address more main memory. (Paterson, 1983a) One example of commands stored in the
transient portion is the format command. Since this command cannot run while a user
application is running, there is no useful purpose in keeping this code in resident memory.

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Memory management.

The System Me mory.

The lowest addressable memory contains a table with 256 interrupt vectors. DOS uses
three types of interrupts: internal hardware, external hardware, and software interrupts. An
example of an event that would generate an internal hardware interrupt is an attempt to divide by
zero. External hardware interrupts are typically generated
Reserved for BIOS 1MB by peripheral device controllers and math co-processors.
Since both of these interrupts types are essentially hard-
Unused wired into the system, neither of these may be modified.
640k
Software interrupts can be generated by either application
Command Transient programs or the operating system. Interrupts are
Program memory synchronized by the OS in two steps. First, the OS places
the contents of the Program Status Word (PSW), the code
segment register, and the instruction pointer register on a
stack. Second, it disables the interrupt system until the
working interrupt is resolved. The CPU then uses the 8-bit
number placed on the system bus by the interrupt device to
resume operations and re-activates the interrupt system.

Command Resident The DOS kernel loads itself into the low memory,
DOS Kernel 1k just above the space occupied by the interrupt vectors and
I/O System the IO system, starting at 1k. Memory addressing initially
used a 16-bit word with direct access from the address
Interrupt Vectors 0k
register. Starting with the 80286 systems, a segment-
Figure 2, DOS Memory Map offset scheme was used to determine the exact physical
location of the data or instructions. While each segment is
64 bytes long, they begin only 16 bytes away from the previous. The DOS High Memory is
actually a bug in the OS that allows programmers to use the 16 bytes within the 1MB limit to
reference a segment of memory above the 1MB limit.

Expanded memory (EMS) implementation was another reason DOS programmers never
exploited the protected mode of the 80286 processor. EMS implemented a memory page frame
within the 1MB limit, but above the 640kb TPA. Using the page frame, the system could
address up to 16MB of memory (on special memory boards). Additional memory management
schemes were adopted after the introduction of Microsoft Windows, but they are beyond the
scope of this paper.

Discrimination and behavior characteristics by program type.

MS-DOS recognizes three different types of program files, each having different internal
file formats: .COM, .EXE, and .BAT.

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 Beginning with version 2 of MS-DOS, the operating system began supporting dynamic
allocation, modification, and release of main memory blocks. The amount of memory allocated
depended on several factors.

Significantly, the language used to write an application is a determining factor in the

ability of DOS to dynamically allocate memory. If the program is written in C or assembly
language, DOS will dynamically allocate memory. Programs written in any other language
supported by DOS get their memory allocation at process creation time. For these processes, the
type of file and the size of the transient program area (TPA) at the time of process creation
determines memory allocation. Files with the .COM extension are pure binary and limited to
64k in size (application and data), but are given the entire Transition Program Area (TPA)
regardless of whether they need it or not. (Flynn, McHoes, 1996) Program files with an .EXE
extension include a header which specifies the minimum and maximum memo ry required to run
the program. If the maximum memory is available, DOS allocates it to the process. If the
minimum is not available, the process is not allowed to start. Files with a .BAT extension (batch
files) are text files with a list of commands to be executed sequentially by the command
processor. Since batch files are actually lists of commands and programs to execute, their limits
on memory are a factor of the programs and commands they call.

With the exception of the .COM programs, there is no limit to the number of programs
that can be loaded in the TPA. The limit is size, not quantity.

Through version 3.3, the memory management subsystem used the first fit algorithm
exclusively and a linked list of memory blocks. Subsequently, the best-fit and last-fit algorithms
were added as selectable options for memory management.

A memory block can be as small as 16-bytes or as large as the memory available. The
first 5-bytes of each block contain descriptive data about the file and its size. The first byte
indicates if this is the last block (90h) or not (77h). Bytes 1 and 2 includes a busy indicator (0
indicates busy) and the pointer to the Program Segment Prefix. The final two bytes indicate the
number of paragraphs contained in the block. The code:

9000000006h

Indicates that this is the last block of memory (90), it is busy (00), its pointer to the PSP is (00),
and the block contains 6 paragraphs of memory (each paragraph is 16-bytes).

When the operating system receives a memory request it searches the linked list for a
contiguous block of memory that meets the requirements of the requesting process. If an
adequate block exists, the process is assigned to that block. An error is generated if the linked
list is broken and the system requires a reboot to recover. If two adjacent blocks become free,
they are merged together and linked to the list of free blocks. A well designed program will
release blocks when they are no longer needed by its processes. A poorly designed program will
not release blocks until the program and its processes terminate.

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Processor Modes and Memory.

The original IMB PCs were only able to address 1MB of main memory. The original
version of MS-DOS was designed with the same limitation, thereby limiting DOS applications to
the 640k that DOS makes available. With the introduction of the Intel 286 processor, the system
was capable of addressing more than 1MB of main memory. As each new processor was
designed, care was taken to ensure it would still be compatible with the original 8086 processor.
The backwards compatible 8086 mode is now called the real mode. The real mode subjects the
new processor to the original memory MS-DOS size limits, but does take advantage of the
increased speed of the processor. (Kozierok, 2001a)

Beginning with the IBM-AT system using Intel’s 80286 chip, the protected mode was
introduced and the processor could address 16MB of RAM. Although DOS did not support
many of the features available with the new protected mode, the hardware could now address all
of the systems memory – eliminating the previous 1MB limit, multi-tasking, virtual memory, and
a 32-bit access to memory and device drivers. The key difference in the architecture of the 286
processor and the new protected mode was the address scheme. While the 8086 accessed
memory directly from the address register (multiplied by 16 to get the base address), the 286
introduced a descriptor that used four 16-bit words. Using the characteristics of the new
descriptor, several capabilities were added: indirection and segment addressing, four privilege
levels, and a table indicator to distinguish between local and global memory.

Although protected mode was available with Intel’s 80286 processor, changing modes in
either direction required rebooting the system. As a result of the difficulty in switching modes,
and the desire to retain legacy support, MS-DOS was never enhanced to take advantage of the
protected mode so few application software developers did either. With the development of the
80386 and 80486 processors, the system could switch modes without rebooting making the use
of the protected mode much more attractive. In addition to faster clock speeds, the memory
descriptors used two 32-bit words rather than the four 16-bit words used in the 80286, making
them more efficient. However, most software changes came as a result of DOS extenders and
Microsoft’s introduction of their Windows OS. The memory management and mode switching
was handled by the Windows portion of the OS and imposed on DOS.

Conclusion.

Given the environment in which it was developed and the sophistication of the
development tools available at the time, MS-DOS was an adequate operating system. Despite its
shortcomings, it established a standard that increased the pace and presence of technology in
society. The fact that DOS survived from 1981 through 1994 make it the most durable operating
system in the history of the personal computer and ensure its notoriety. If there’s a lesson to be
learned with respect to Microsoft and DOS, it is that it’s more important to have money, market-
timing, market-share and broad adoption by major manufacturers than it is to write a superior
operating system.

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 Bibliography

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(1990). Extending DOS. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company,
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Flynn, I. & McHoes, A., (1996). Understanding Operating Systems. Boston:

PWS PublishingCompany. QA76.76.063F598 1996; 96-27705; 005.4’3—dc20;
ISBN 0-534-95093-0.

Kozierok, Charles (2001a). “The PC Guide.” URL:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/cpu/arch/int/modesReal-c.html

Kozierok, Charles (2001b). “The PC Guide.” URL:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/cpu/arch/int/modesProtected-c.html

Paterson, Tim (1983a). “An Inside Look at MS-DOS.” URL:

http://www.patersontech.com/Dos/Byte/History.html

Paterson, Tim (1983b). “A Short History of MS-DOS.” URL:

http://www.patersontech.com/Dos/Byte/History.html

Paterson, Tim (1981c). “DOS.” URL: http://www.patersontech.com/Dos/Encyclo.htm

Stallings, William (1995). Operating Systems. Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentic-Hall, Inc.
QA76.76.063S733 1995; 94-41175; 005.4’3—dc20; ISBN0-02-415493-8.

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (1999).

“Disk Operating System.” URL: http://www.netnam.vn/unescocourse/os/22.ht m

Wyatt, A., Tiley, E., & Paisley, J. (1996). Using MS-DOS 6.2, Special Edition.
Indianapolis: Que Corporation. 93-86565; ISBN 1-56529-646-x.