It was developed and sold by ICD in 1987-1993, and many years later picked up by the third-party community SpartaDOS X Upgrade Project, which still maintains the software.

The rights for the 8-bit ICD inventory were purchased in November 1993 by Michael Hohman, officially as Fine Tooned Engineering.

FTE released a slightly updated version 4.22 on 5 November 1995,[2] and, after two or three years, disappeared together with all the items and rights it owned.

[4] It resulted in several unofficial revisions of the software, incorporating many of the utilities written since 1992, cleaning many identified problems and including numerous improvements.

As of 2024[update] the published versions are: SpartaDOS X is a non-multitasking operating system intentionally modeled after and closely resembling MS-DOS in look and feel.

It consists of the kernel, the system library, several types of drivers, the shell (called COMMAND.COM) and a number of utility programs.

There is full support for Atari-type serial disk drives as well as for parallel hard drives, as long as they conform to Atari standards (i.e. as long as they use the "plug-and-play" Parallel Bus Interface (PBI) mechanism implemented in the ROM OS of the XL/XE computers).

It also facilitates such tasks as error handling, parsing the command line, as well as managing memory, file and device resources etc.

The library also contains a menu-driven disk formatter, that can be invoked at any time, not only from the DOS' Command Processor, but also from within an application program.

A program called MENU facilitates complex file management tasks and can serve as a replacement shell.

Among the dedicated programs, which are not directly available on the cartridge and thus are not bundled with DOS itself, there are disk editors available as well as utilities to check and repair filesystem consistency.

The common misconception about that division is that these respective parts correspond to BIOS and DOS on an IBM PC compatible machine.

Consequently, all the file management functions are centralized in the "OS"-part, and the "DOS"-part is only one of its subordinated device drivers, that performs on a mass-storage media (like floppy disk).

A "DOS" for Atari, then, typically consists of the aforementioned device driver (called FMS, "File Management System"), and an application program playing the role of the OS shell.

Such a design has some shortcomings, for example, no typical DOS is able to keep more than eight files opened at a time, because this is the limit imposed by the API of the ROM-based "OS".