It was 1991 and IBM ruled the PC business. Its huge desktop computers cost thousands, so pretty much only large enterprises could afford them. A few hardy enthusiasts had them, but you had to travel ...

The PC has been one of the most powerful gaming platforms for as long as it has existed, continually providing the best graphics and most advanced features. In its early days, players were impressed ...

DOS_deck is a new way to play classic games released for the MS-DOS operating system on the Steam Deck or PC browser with a controller. The UI follows the look and feel of the Steam Deck interface. So ...

Do you still long to run WordPerfect 5.1, Lotus 1-2-3 4, or Doom on DOS? Well, if you do, there's a new way to revisit the PC world of the 1980s: The newly open-sourced PC-MOS/386 v501. PC-MOS, for ...

Strictly-speaking modern x86 computers running Windows should be compatible with any software written for the very first MS-DOS PCs starting with the original IBM PC and its clones. In practice, it's ...

You know your brand-new computer is all set to run today's top-of-the-line software. What you probably spend less time pondering is "legacy support." That is, while there may be compatibility issues, ...

Kenneth M. Frith is moving away from Windows XP (as he should). But he still has some old DOS programs he’s either unwilling or unable to give up. Can they run in Windows 8? The big question is: Does ...

It is a great shame that back in the days when a typical home computer had easy low-level hardware access that is absent from today’s machines, the cost of taking advantage of it was so high.

Every once in awhile Ars publishes DOS articles, which gets me thinking about DOS again, and I thought, perhaps there would be value in DOS perpetual thread on the Forums, for non-article-specific DOS ...

PC-104 is a standard computer form factor that most people outside of industrial settings probably haven’t seen before. It’s essentially an Intel 486 processor with lots of support for standards that ...

We don’t miss the days of DOS. Maybe we’re a bit lazy these days, but we’d sooner click an icon to launch an application or open a document than faff about with the command line. But we do miss some ...