MS-DOS stands for Micro Soft Disk Operating System. This means it is an operating system that can be even loaded from disk (as distinct from tape, or hardware). It does not mean that it is an operating system which controls disks, although that is certainly one of the functions it performs What it controls is the computer. MS-DOS or DOS in short is one of most successful operating system for personal computers
DOS is not the “ friendliest” of operating system It requires the users to enter instructions at a commands line-the infamous DOS prompt. There may be a complicated syntax to these commands but DOS cannot help you if you forget what it is You will have to look in the manual and still you can find it. However, DOS can run on limited hardware such as machines with 286 microprocessors
MS-DOS is not meant for sophisticated activities such as networking. Another serious limitation of DOS was its character-based environment. That is, as compared with graphical based environments, DOS is little attractive. Further as an operating system, DOS can handle only one task at a given moment. SO, it is a single task operating system.
OS/2
The operating system named, Operating System/2 or OS/2 was joint product from IBM and Microsoft companies This operating system was designed to support application written to run on DOS and IBM machines. So, the biggest advantages of OS/2 was that it could run applications written for DOS and Windows , both are Microsoft products
Note that OS/2 was a graphical based, so, more attractive than DOS. However, OS/2 could not support activities such as networking, multiprocessing and multi-user. Further, there were only a limited application written for DOS. Because, people were very much interested in developing powerful operating system than writing application for old DOS. As a result of that OS/2 was not so popular
