DOS Secrets To program well, you have to know more about your hardware and DOS internals. This book is neither a hardware book nor a beginners’ book. So I would slightly touch the hardware and DOS internals in this chapter. In many Institutions hardware & software are being taught as different subjects. And people don’t know how both are related. For system programming you must know the relationship between the two.

This chapter will help you to understand why a programmer should know hardware & DOS internals for DOS programming. 14.1 Prelude DOS (Disk Operating System) is the widely used operating system. It is a single-user operating system. DOS is designed to provide an easy way to use disks for storage. It is very efficient in controlling, accessing and managing the data from disk drives. The basic operations performed by DOS are regulate space allocation, keep track of files, save and retrieve files and manage other control functions associated with disk storage. Thus using DOS an interface is made between the user and the computer. This DOS is same for all the systems. For loading this DOS to the memory BIOS, bootstrap program, diagnostic testing programs are very essential and we will discuss it in the coming sections.

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