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MS-DOS Short for Microsoft Disk operating system , MS-DOS is a non-graphical command line operating system derived from 86-DOS that was created for IBM compatible computers. MS-DOS was first introduced by Microsoft in August 1981 and was last updated in 1994 when MS-DOS 6.22 was released. Today, MS-DOS is no longer used; however, the command shell, more commonly known as the Windows command line is still used by many users. In the picture to the right, is an example of what a MS-DOS window more appropriately referred to as the Windows command line looks like under Microsoft Windows . Today, most computer users are only familiar with how to navigate Microsoft Windows using the mouse. Unlike Windows, MS-DOS is a command-line and is navigated by using MS-DOS commands. For example, if you wanted to see all the files in a folder in Windows you would double-click the folder to open the folder in Windows Explorer. In MS-DOS to view that sa...

On the Microsoft Windows operating system , the Run command is used to directly open an application or document whose path is known. It functions more or less like a single-line command line interface .

Find keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft products in the following table listed by product name.

                                     Ascii was very simplistic, and so was extended by adding 'extended' sets by various manufacturers. Apart from being confusing this was still restricted to 256 characters. Now computers are more widely established around the world the need to show other characters such as Japanese and Chinese languages along with various symbols became more important. Unicode is an attempt to standardise every character possible and the latest version (4) is shown below. Tables are in PDF format so you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view them.

                The following table is nothing to do with ASCII, but has been requested by a number of you out there. When a key on your keyboard is pressed, a code is sent which can be recognised by software. Programmers will find the most use for this table to map keys to actions for the function keys etc. 

            ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Computers can only understand numbers, so an ASCII code is the numerical representation of a character such as 'a' or '@' or an action of some sort. ASCII was developed a long time ago and now the non-printing characters are rarely used for their original purpose. Below is the ASCII character table and this includes descriptions of the first 32 non-printing characters. ASCII was actually designed for use with teletypes and so the descriptions are somewhat obscure. If someone says they want your CV however in ASCII format, all this means is they want 'plain' text with no formatting such as tabs, bold or underscoring - the raw format that any computer can understand. This is usually so they can easily import the file into their own applications without issues. Notepad.exe creates ASCII text, or in MS Word you can...