Development History
At the time (1984) MSX-DOS was written, there was only one popular disk operating system for 8-bit Intel 8080 compatible microprocessors, which was the CP/M system, written by Digital Research. It was also often used with Z80 systems, because the Z80 used an extended 8080 architecture. Microsoft's own disk operating system was also inspired by CP/M.
To be able to run (slightly modified) CP/M software Microsoft decided to implement functionality similar to major parts of the CP/M BIOS, routines that CP/M systems used to do specific disk operating tasks, such as opening files etc. Instead of basing the command processor on CP/M's CCP, which was known for some user unfriendliness, a command line interpreter (COMMAND.COM) inspired on its MS-DOS counterpart was used. Microsoft also chose its own FAT12 file system over CP/M's filing methods. This ensured that MSX-DOS floppies could also be used on an MS-DOS machine, and that only one single formatting and filing system would be used. This was an important decision, because CP/M disk were often not interchangeable between machines, incompatible disc formatting schemes being a factor in this.
Microsoft also added a standard set of disk commands to MSX-DOS, that were compatible with MS-DOS but not with CP/M. Finally they converted their "Pipelineing" system from MS-DOS to MSX-DOS. The resulting DOS was a system that was much user friendlier than CP/M, but was (in principle) compatible with major CP/M software packages such as WordStar, Turbo Pascal and the "M80" assembler and "L80" linker.
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