<Tr> <Td> May </Td> <Td> Paterson, with his working two - card prototype boardset installed in a Cromemco Z - 2 box, drives to Microsoft to try it with Microsoft's Standalone Disk BASIC - 86--a version of BASIC with a rudimentary built - in operating system--which Bob O'Rear developed for the 8086 by simulating the 8086 chip on a DEC computer . After eliminating a few minor bugs, Microsoft had a working 8086 BASIC . </Td> </Tr> <Tr> <Td> Kildall confirms to The Intelligent Machines Journal that he is working on CP / M 2.0, for both 8080 - and 8086 - based systems . </Td> </Tr> <Tr> <Td> June </Td> <Td> Microsoft and Paterson attend the National Computer Conference in New York City to show Microsoft's 8086 BASIC running on Seattle Computer's system, sharing Lifeboat Associates' ten - by - ten - foot booth . At that meeting, Paterson is introduced to Microsoft's MDOS operating system (later renamed to MIDAS), which used a variant of Standalone BASIC's 8 - bit File Allocation Table (FAT) file system . </Td> </Tr> <Tr> <Td> July </Td> <Td> Intel releases the Intel 8088 microprocessor, a lower cost variant of the 8086 which has an 8 - bit external data bus instead of the 16 - bit bus of the 8086 (the 16 - bit registers and one megabyte address space were unchanged). To the programmer, the 8086 and 8088 instruction sets are identical, except for execution speed . The 8088 uses lower cost 8 - bit RAM . </Td> </Tr>

Last version of ms dos that was released separately