application layer working process

The evolution of MS-DOS to take account of the 386/486 was made artificially slow due to the initial attempt to make OS/2 its natural successor. The current situation is that Microsoft plans to build a series of operating environments suitable for the 386/486 starting with MS-DOS, moving on to MS-DOS plus Windows and finishing with Windows NT for the most powerful systems. IBM are still trying to promote OS/2 as the operating system of choice for the 386/486 and so make Windows and Windows NT obsolete. However, for the committed MS-DOS user what matters is that Microsoft have restarted work on MS-DOS and new versions that make increasingly good use of the 386 should appear over the next few years.

Before moving on to consider MS-DOS 5 it is worth considering how MS-DOS 3.3 and MS-DOS 4 can best take advantage of the 386. In practice, though, the better option is to upgrade to MS-DOS