Category:Disk operating systems

A disk operating system is an operating system component that deals with high-level disk-IO such as providing the abstraction of a file system resident on a disk storage system (made up of hard disks and/or floppy disk drives). Usually, it is loaded separately from the main operating system to save memory.

Disk Operating System was often abbreviated to the three-letter acronym DOS (not to be confused with the DOS family of disk operating systems for the IBM PC compatible platform). The use of "DOS" as a suffix of operating system names was most common in the era when floppy disk drives were the predominant secondary storage technology, and command line interfaces the predominant OS user interface. With a few exceptions, this mostly pertained to home-/personal computers of the 1970s and 80s.