11 Facts About Apple DOS

Apple DOS is the family of disk operating systems for the Apple II series of microcomputers from late 1978 through early 1983.

On 10 April 1978 Apple signed a $13,000 contract with Shepardson Microsystems to write a DOS and deliver it within 35 days.

Apple DOS provided detailed specifications, and early Apple DOS employee Randy Wigginton worked closely with Shepardson's Paul Laughton as the latter wrote the operating system with punched cards and a minicomputer.

Apple DOS never offered a utility to copy in the other direction.

On top of the File Manager API, the main Apple DOS routines are implemented which hook into the machine's BASIC interpreter and intercept all disk commands.

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Apple DOS recognizes these types for catalog listings only, and there are no direct ways to manipulate these types of files.

Process of loading Apple DOS involves a series of very tiny programs, each of which carries the loading process forward a few steps before passing control to the next program in the chain.

Original Apple DOS II included BASIC interpreter in ROM known originally as Apple DOS BASIC and later as Integer BASIC.

Shortly after ProDOS came out, Apple withdrew permission from third parties to redistribute DOS 3.

Commercial games usually did not use Apple DOS, instead having their own custom disk routines for copy protection purposes as well as for performance.

Later, programmers outside Apple DOS rewrote the File Manager routines to avoid making the extra copy for most sectors of a file; RWTS was instructed to read or write sectors directly to or from main memory rather than from a disk buffer whenever a full sector was to be transferred.