SOFTWARE
MS-DOS 2.0 is a
direct
descendant
of MS-DOS 1.25
which
became
widely
used
on
3rd
generation
16-bit
microcomputers
such
as
the
ACT
Sirius
1,
and
(as PC-DOS)
on
the
IBM PC.
It
was
written
by MicroSoft Corporation,
one of
the
worlds leading
micro-computer
software
houses.
Cosmetically
similar
to
CP/M-like
operating systems,
most
of
its
advantages are
with
its
internal
commands,
such
as
UNIX-type features
including
Piping,
tree-structured
directories
and
Background operations.
The
BIOS
consists
of a
number
of hardware device drivers
which
MS-DOS
makes
use
of.
There
are drivers for
the
keyboard, screen, MicroScreen,
communications
ports,
clock,
disk
drives,
sound
and
various
hardware
add-ons.
There
are also software drivers,
which
control graphics,
background printing,
disk
cache
and
calculator.
The
BIOS
was
written
in
8086
assembly
language
and
Pascal.
Most
of
the
hardware
interfacing code,
such
as
the
keyboard, video display driver
and
low-level device
I/O
was
written
in
assembler, leaving
the
code
which
involves
large-scale decision
making
such
as
the
disk
handler
to
be
written
in
Pascal.
Insource
form,
it
consists of a
number
of
modules
which
have
to
be
linked
together
to
form
the
BIOS.
BIOS FEATURES - OVERVIEW OF CAPABILITIES
The
Apricot
BIOS
is
a
modular
system
written
using
the
latest
structured
programming
techniques.
It is a fast,
efficient piece of code
which
is
capable of
making
maximum
use
of
the
Apricot's
advanced hardware features.
This
BIOS
has
many
features
implemented
over
and
above
the
those
incorporated
in
other
10
systems.
Foreground and
Background
Operations
The
Apricot BIOS
has
been
implemented
in
such
a
manner
that
fully-Hedged "foreground"
and
"background"
processing is supported.
That
is
all
hardware
operations
to
and
from
I/O
drivers are buffered
and
interrupt
driven.
This
m~kes
it
possible
to
use
MS-DOS
in
a real-time
environment
with
operations
(such as
printer
spooling)
being
executed
in
the
background.
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