Way back in 1981 an upstart computer company called Microsoft hit the scene after purchasing QDOS, written by Tim Paterston, from Seattle Computer Products. They renamed it MS-DOS and it has grown and grown since then. It's only competition was PC-DOS, created by IBM
NOTE: Some releases are so insugnificant that they are nowhere to be found. That is why there are so many jumps between versions
1981
MS-DOS 1.0: Renamed edition of QDOS
July 1981
MS-DOS 1.14: Microsoft renames 86-DOS as MS-DOS 1.14, also a product of Seattle Computer Products
May 1982
MS-DOS 1.25: Adds support for double sided floppy disks, first release for the IBM PC
March 1983
MS-DOS 2.0: Added support for directories, double-density 5.25in floppy disks, and hard drives
October 1983
MS-DOS 2.1: Added support for IBM PCjr
March 1984
MS-DOS 2.11: Added support for non-English characters and dates
August 1984
MS-DOS 3.0: Added support for PC AT 1.2 MB Floppy disks, supported hard drive partitions up to 32 MB with support for 2 drive partitions on a single hard drive
November 1984
MS-DOS 3.1: Added support for Microsoft Networking
January 1986
MS-DOS 3.2: Added support for 3.5 inch, 720 kB floppy disk drives
August 1987
MS-DOS 3.3: Supported multiple logical drives
June 1988
MS-DOS 4.0: This version was derived from IBM's codebase rather than Microsoft's
December 1988
MS-DOS 4.01: Bug fixes
June 1991
MS-DOS 5.0: Included memory management, full-screen editor, QBasic programming language, online help, DOS Shell task switcher, and FastLynx file transfer utility licensed from Rupp Technology. Also used as the basis for Virtual DOS Machine for computers running Windows
March 1993
MS-DOS 6.0: Added Double Space disk compression, disk defragmentation, and other features
February 1994
MS-DOS 6.21: Following a Stac Electronics lawsuit, this removed DoubleSpace disk compression.
June 1994
MS-DOS 6.22: The last stand-alone version of MS-DOS. DoubleSpace replaced with non-infringing but compatible Drive Space tool. It was designed specifically to be used with Windows 3.11
August 1995
MS-DOS 7.0: Embedded in Windows 95
. Included Logical Block Addressing and Long File Name (LFN) support
August 1996
MS-DOS 7.1: Embedded in Windows 95B (OSR2) and Windows 98 First and Second editions. It added support for the FAT 32 File System.
September 2000
MS-DOS 8.0: Embedded in Windows ME. A subset is included with 32-bit versions of Windows XP and Vista. This was the last version of MS-DOS. It removes the SYS command, ability to boot to command line and other features
All info found using Wikipedia