MS‐DOS

MS-DOS was a [command-line interface] operating system, [Microsoft]'s successor to Digital Research's [CP/M] (1974) as the primary OS for microcomputers (home computers) until [Windows 95] came along. Derived from Seattle Computer Products' 86-DOS (initially QDOS, the Quick and Dirty Operating System), for eight years starting in 1980 Microsoft's DOS was sold to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and didn't target the end user with retail sales until MS-DOS 5.0 in Jun 1991. [ANSI.SYS] shipped in MS-DOS 2.0 which dropped in March of 1983, prior to which you really would have had to know your way around the hardware in order to squeeze ANSI art out of your PC.

The peak BBS / underground [artscene] era coincided with MS-DOS dominance for a decade starting in the mid-'80s, and consequently many of the great classic [terminal program]s (eg. [Telix], [Telemate], [Terminate]), BBS-hosting programs (eg. [Telegard], [Renegade], [PCBoard], [WildCat!]), BBS door games ([Legend of the Red Dragon], [TradeWars 2002], [Barren Realms Elite], [The Pit]) and period computer art utility programs (eg. TheDraw, [ACiDdraw], Pablo, [Scream Tracker], [Tombstone], Spoon, [Fontedit], [glow3], [ao]) and the vast majority of the warez circulating through the underground in this period were MS-DOS programs for which there weren't great equivalents on the period-competing platforms of the Apple Macintosh, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga etc. (A lot of great underground art and music software paradigms (like MOD [tracking]) did originate on the Amiga, but targeting the widest userbase they had to meet the MS-DOS contingent on the platform they were using. Similarly, the demoscene's foundations were laid in the C64 and Commodore Amiga contexts, but after Future Crew dropped Second Reality in 1993, no one could argue that the IBM PC (I expect they mostly bypass the operating system and interact as close to the bare metal as they can) was not a capable and worthwhile platform for demo production.)

Varieties of DOS for the PC included IBM's PC-DOS, Digital Research's [DR-DOS] and also there was JP Software's [4DOS] command-line interpreter. Modern-day users who need an MS-DOS-like experience usually find that [DOSbox] (or [DOSemu] under [Linux]) gets the job done.

Home users gradually started undermining use of MS-DOS as a daily driver on [IBM PC]s and clones through use of Microsoft's [Windows], especially after the release of Windows 95, but [OS/2] also found some fans -- both of them coincidentally having a complete DOS command line available under the hood to allow backward compatibility with the DOS programs on which users had come to depend. (MS-DOS v7 remained embedded in Windows through Win ME and Win '98, but while adapting Windows NT into Win XP, it was not ported over. Modern versions of Windows still have the CMD command line, but it is no DOS.) This was a problem for the computer art underground near the turn of the century, since the entire software ecosystem their community, culture and hobby depended upon was upended without much concern for back compatibility. For many, it looked like no DOS -> no ACiDDraw -> no ANSI art!