MK-DOS

MK-DOS
Company type	Operating system
Industry	Computer software
Founded	1993
Founder	Mikhail Korolev, Dmitriy Butyrskiy
Products	Operating system for Elektronika BK series

MK-DOS represented a popular operating system designed for the Elektronika BK series of personal computers. Its development began in 1993, led by Mikhail Korolev and Dmitriy Butyrskiy. Much like ANDOS, MK-DOS guaranteed comprehensive compatibility with all BK models by simulating the BK-0010 environment on the more advanced BK-0011 and BK-0011M hardware. Requests made by programs to access magnetic tape through standard ROM functions were transparently redirected to disk storage instead.

The operating system accommodated up to four physical disk drives, a limitation imposed by the installed disk ROM, and allowed multiple hard disk partitions—each identified by a letter from the Latin alphabet and capped at 32 MB in size—to function as independent logical drives. Starting with version 3.0, MK-DOS introduced the capability to mount disk images as logical drives. Additionally, on BK-0011 or BK-0011M machines, the system automatically generated a RAM disk in memory during startup.

MK-DOS primarily utilized the MicroDOS file system, which did not permit file fragmentation and required periodic spatial reorganization to maintain contiguous free space. This process was akin to RT-11's 'SQUEEZE' command or Acorn's *COMPACT utility on the BBC Micro. Although MicroDOS was not compatible with RT-11’s file system, it shared numerous architectural concepts. The ANDOS system offered read-only access to MicroDOS volumes. Filenames within MicroDOS were restricted to 14 characters without distinct handling of file extensions.

A basic MK-DOS setup demanded only 8 KB of memory. It included MCommander, a dual-pane file manager reminiscent of Norton Commander, along with utilities and drivers supporting RT-11, FAT12, and CSI-DOS file systems as optional additions.

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