Here's a reply to a kid who asked what MSDOS is:
Back when you still had to crank start your PC, people got tired of having to type binary commands directly into the computer. For example, back in the 1920s, you'd have to type this to get on the interwebs (called Derpanet back then)
01110010011101010110111000100000011010010110010101111000011100000110110001101111011100100110010100101110011001010111100001100101
As you can imagine, that was quite cumbersome, so Bill Gates created a system that used letters to issue commands. He called it DOS, which stands for Disk Operating System. It didn't sell well because no one knew what a disk was.
A few short years later, the Nazis were storming their way across Europe and the Allies needed to find a way to stop them. Code breakers were furiously typing at keyboards but the 1 and 0 keys were wearing out faster than the hardware could be manufactured. Finally, the US government approached Gates in secret to help solve this problem. He struck a deal with them that he would allow them to use his software to fight the Germans, but they would have to allow him to charge PC users for his software even if they didn't want to install it. PCs hadn't been invented yet, so they agreed.
Several decades later, Steve Wozniack invented the Personal Computer and Steve Jobs took most of the credit. Jobs made a career of stealing credit. In the 1980s, he toured Xerox PARC and stole the idea for Mac OS and bragged about it to Bill Gates, who in turn stole the idea from Jobs. Using the previous agreement with the government, Gates forced Windows on the world (Apple avoided this problem by slyly making their computers incompatible with Windows, which unfortunately had the downside of making them incompatible with everything else as well).
The federal government finally realized their error and attempted to renege on their deal, saying that it only covered DOS. Gates argued that Windows WAS DOS underneath, leading to Windows 95 being called "a 32 bit extension to a 16 bit patch to a 8 bit operating system written for a 4 bit system sold by a 2 bit company". Gates took this criticism very hard and spent $500 million on gold flecked Kleenex to dry his tears. Having nearly ruined himself (He only had $99.5 billion of his fortune remaining) out of grief, he decided to buckle down and show the world what he was made of. In 2000, Microsoft released Windows ME, which was hailed as the most innovative, groundbreaking operating system since Microsoft Bob. It was both a technological and financial success, and is still the most widely used operating system in the universe.
Sadly, the CIA had been threatening Gates for some time. Out of concern for his family's safety, Gates released Windows XP in 2001, which was the first consumer OS from Microsoft to not run on DOS. Washington carpe'd this diem and forced Gates to play fairly with other operating systems. But by this time, Microsoft had already captured the market almost completely.
Now secure in his dominance, Gates announced his retirement on his eleventy-first birthday (a respectable age for a geek) and donated $50 billion to a charity named after him and his wife.. which he also ran.... Now that I think about it, did he donate his money to himself???
And that's what DOS is.
I own too many computers to count.
