ETen Chinese System (倚天中文系統) was the most popular

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

-compatible traditional Chinese operating system before Chinese

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...

. DOS did not support Chinese characters, which are not in

Extended ASCII Extended ASCII is a repertoire of character encodings that include (most of) the original 96 ASCII character set, plus up to 128 additional characters. There is no formal definition of "extended ASCII", and even use of the term is sometimes critic ...

. Many companies in Taiwan developed their own

IBM PC compatible IBM PC compatible computers are similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT, all from computer giant IBM, that are able to use the same software and expansion cards. Such computers were referred to as PC clones, IBM clones or IBM PC clones. ...

traditional Chinese operating system running on DOS, which were mutually incompatible between the OS, such as

Kuo Chia "Guo", written in Chinese: 郭, is one of the most common Chinese surnames and means "the wall that surrounds a city" in Chinese. It can also be transliterated into English as Cok, Gou, Quo, Quach, Quek, Que, Keh, Kuo, Kwo, Kuoch, Kok, Koc, ...

(國喬) and Acer. The developer of the Eten OS,

E-TEN E-TEN Information Systems Co., Ltd. (倚天資訊股份有限公司) was an electronics manufacturing company based in Taiwan, specializing in sophisticated handheld devices such as smartphones. Founded in 1985 in Taipei, E-TEN initially became ...

, earned their early profits from sales of their hardware based plug-in card based Chinese system products. Their software (only) Chinese systems were widely copied by many traditional Chinese users and software pirates, but this was difficult for

to control. Most traditional Chinese products were compatible with the Eten OS at that time. When

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

developed the Chinese Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, traditional Chinese software developer and users shifted to Windows from DOS. The last version of the Eten OS was a Chinese Windows-compatible version. The Eten and other traditional Chinese OS are now used in a few DOS based POS systems.

References

External links

E-TEN corporate website

E-TEN Chinese system website
{{Disk operating systems DOS on IBM PC compatibles