Editor’s note: After this article was published, Microsoft issued a statement clarifying that cmd.exe will not be going away after all. Read Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ follow-up column. My very first ...

Sometimes it can be useful to list the contents of one or more directories in a text file, for example by creating a file catalog. Windows does not allow you to perform this operation from File ...

As the forerunner to the graphical user interfaces in Microsoft’s Windows platform, MS-DOS helped set the stage for the company’s dominance in the PC software market. When MS-DOS was released in 1981, ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Before Windows, there was MS-DOS—that’s the Microsoft Disk ...

It sure looked like Microsoft was putting MS-DOS out to pasture. Now it’s saying that the MS-DOS command prompt cmd will continue to live on. According to a Microsoft spokesperson, “Microsoft is not ...

In the old days of computing, there was no nice, pretty Windows operating system, so all commands were given through a textual interface. That system persists as the Command Prompt, which supports ...

Moving files around by dragging and dropping in Windows Explorer is a simple task. Many long-time Windows users may never open a DOS command-line window and may not be familiar with commands that were ...

At the risk of dating myself, I cut my teeth on MS-DOS (after moving on from the Commodore 64, that is), the command-line interface operating system that predated Windows. MS-DOS first arrived in the ...

Four years after working with the Computer History Museum to release the source code for MS-DOS, Microsoft is “re-open-sourcing” its command line operating system from the ’80s. This time the company ...