It was no longer included in MS-DOS version 6, but remained part of the Supplemental Disk.

DOS Shell was one of the first successful attempts to create a basic graphical user interface (GUI) type file manager in DOS, although it is properly referred to as a text user interface (TUI) or Character-Oriented Windows (COW) even though graphical modes were available on supported hardware (VGA-equipped PCs).

An early incarnation of DOS Shell, titled MS-DOS Manager, was bundled exclusively with the Eazy PC, an IBM PC clone manufactured by Zenith Data Systems in 1987.

This permitted the user to compare versions of a file in different directories by their attributes and easily spot duplicates.

However, all the running programs had to fit into conventional memory area, as there was no support for swapping to disk.