The acquisition and marketing of MS-DOS were pivotal in the Microsoft Corporation’s transition to software industry giant.Īmerican computer programmer Timothy Paterson, a developer for Seattle Computer Products, wrote the original operating system for the Intel Corporation’s 8086 microprocessor in 1980, initially calling it QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), which was soon renamed 86-DOS. MS-DOS, in full Microsoft Disk Operating System, the dominant operating system for the personal computer (PC) throughout the 1980s.