Apple DOS
From Comp Resource
| Apple DOS | |
|---|---|
| Made in: | 1978 |
| Discontinued: | 1983 |
| Platform: | Apple II |
| Preceding OS: | first OS |
| Succeeding OS: | ProDOS |
Apple DOS was the operating system used on early Apple II systems. However, the interface came from Applesoft BASIC, or on older systems, Integer BASIC. (NOTE: When Apple DOS loads, it loads Integer BASIC on a "language card" on newer Apple IIs, such as the Apple IIe.)
[edit] History
Apple DOS was announced when Apple president Mike Markkula became dissatisfied with the audio cassette interface on the Apple II. At the executive board meeting in December 1977, he made a list of company goals. On the top of that list was "floppy disk". Steve Wozniak was to be the one to build a floppy disk drive and write a disk operating system. Wozniak did not know much about how floppy disk drives worked, but he once read a Shugart manual about how the drives worked. He then looked at an IBM drive to see how they correctly timed the read and write functions. They did it with complex circuitry. It was then when Wozniak realized that if he constructed the disk drives another way ("soft-sectored", the drive would self-synchronize), no circuitry was needed. They also did away with a little timing hole needed for IBM drives ("hard-sectored", this used the hole to tell what part of the disk was under the heads at any time).
Wozniak tabbed Randy Wigginton to write the disk operating system. They worked hard, trying to get everything completed by the Consumer Electronics Show 1978. They did, and by the first week of 1978 (the week the show was held), they had a completed drive, operating system, and demo disk. The information on the disk was accidentally lost when Wigginton suggested making a backup of it, but it was successfully recovered and everything went as planned.
[edit] Version history
- 3.0: Beta version (not released)
- 3.1: First official release
- 3.2: Apple II Plus compatible.
- 3.2.1: Patch for the COPY utility; minor bug fixes
- 3.3: Hardware and disk upgrades, minor bug fix in 1983
Currently, it is unknown when Apple stopped support for DOS 3.3.
Apple DOS is a stub. You can help The Computer Resource by expanding it.
