Re: [Sheflug] linux.org

[Craig Andrews <nospam [at] fishbot.org.uk>]

Thats basically what I meant! DOS is a minimal OS in that it is
essenetially a commandline interface to the hard disk ;-)

Win95 is a step in the right direction for MS, but is still essentially a
shell on a kernel on a shell. WinNT is better in this sense, but having
the GUI as part of the kernel, although fast, is certainly a pain to fix
should anything go wrong.

Craig Andrews
craig@fishbot.org.uk

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Life would be so much easier if we 
could just look at the source code.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

On Wed, 1 Nov 2000, Alastair Donlon wrote:

> 
> I have to dispute the notion of DOS as an OS. DOS is an example of
> a shell + some utilities. It lacks at least one fundamental part of
> an OS - a kernel. There's virtually no management of... processes,
> memory, disks, i/o ports, network,... In effect, every single
> application program had to be its own kernel and do most of the
> work itself. Apart from the odd few bits of drivers and TSR's, DOS
> had none of the important features of a kernel.
> 
> That's where Win95 made a big difference. It may have been built
> on top of DOS, but it added the kernel which gives it the functionality
> of a _modern_ operating system (modern meaning 80's on).
> 
> A.D.
> 
> On Wed, Nov 01, 2000 at 08:30:54AM +0000, Craig Andrews wrote:
> > Basically, I define an operating system as a kernel (for linking the
> > software to the hardware), some kind of shell (graphical or otherwise, for
> > linking the user to the software), and of course apps/utilities, enough to
> > constitute some kind of file system management, process control, software
> > execution, etc. By these terms, good example of a minimal operating system
> > is MS-DOS. It boots, it lets you do what you like, and thats it...
> > 
> > Craig Andrews
> > craig [at] fishbot.org.uk
> > 
> > - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> > Life would be so much easier if we 
> > could just look at the source code.
> > - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> > 
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