MS-DOS is 30 years old today. Well, kind of. On 27 July 1981, Microsoft gave the name MS-DOS to the disk operating system it acquired on that day from Seattle Computer Products (SCP), a hardware company owned and run by a fellow called Rod Brock.
SCP developed what it at various times called QDOS and 86-DOS to run on a CPU card it had built based on Intel's 8086 processor.
The company had planned to use Digital Research's CP/M-86 operating system, then still in development. But, having released the card in November 1979 - it shipped with an 8086-compatible version Microsoft's Basic language interpreter-cum-operating system - and reached April 1980 without CP/M-86 becoming available to bundle, SCP decided it had to create its own OS for the card.
