DOS/V
variant of PC-DOS/MS-DOS developed for Japan
DOS/V is a Japanese computing initiative starting in 1990 to allow DOS on IBM PC compatibles with VGA cards to handle double-byte (DBCS) Japanese text via software alone. It was initially developed from PC DOS by IBM for its PS/55 machines (a localized version of the PS/2), but IBM gave the driver source code to Microsoft, who then licensed a DOS/V-compatible version of MS-DOS to other companies.
Kanji fonts and other locale information are stored on the hard disk rather than on special chips as in the preceding AX architecture. As with AX, its great value for the Japanese computing industry is in allowing compatibility with foreign software. This had not been possible under NEC's proprietary PC-98 system, which was the market leader before DOS/V emerged. DOS/V stands for "Disk Operating System/VGA" (not "version 5"; DOS/V came out at approximately the same time as DOS 5). In Japan, IBM compatible PCs became popular along with DOS/V, so they were often referred to as "DOS/V machine" or "DOS/V pasocom" even though DOS/V operating systems are no longer common by the late 1990s.
The promotion of DOS/V was done by IBM and its consortium called PC Open Architecture Developers' Group (OADG). Digital Research released a Japanese DOS/V-compatible version of DR DOS 6.0 in 1992.
History
In the early 1980s, IBM Japan developed two x86-based personal computer lines for the Asia-Pacific region: the IBM 5550 and IBM JX. The 5550 read Kanji fonts from the disk and displayed text as graphic characters on a 1024 × 768-resolution monitor.
“DOS/V” enters the record as variant of PC-DOS/MS-DOS developed for Japan. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what variant, PC-DOS and MS-DOS can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1049628. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1990, 1992 and 1024.
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This entry incorporates text from “DOS/V” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.