Darren New wrote:
> MS-DOS is still around after your application finishes running. It's 
> providing services to multiple (sometimes even concurrent) applications. 
> It manages resource allocations between different applications.
> 
> I'd still like you to answer the question I'm asking. Because it sounds 
> like you're saying that any OS where you can bypass the OS and talk 
> straight to hardware isn't an OS, and I suspect you'll find that the 
> expression "operating system" was coined before machines had protected 
> modes.

Yeah. His definition would make Apple DOS and Prodos "not operating 
systems", because it was possible, in both, to talk directly to Apple 
hardware, and even take full control of the reads and writes from the 
disk (like in copy programs, which used there "own" code to do that, 
since it let them control timing and sector numbers, etc.)

For that matter, it wouldn't even be a valid argument to claim that an 
OS needs to provide resources to "multiple" apps, which is a possible 
argument, since while Microsoft abandoned further work on DOS when they 
put out Windows, some companies, like one called Concurrent Systems, 
made multiuser DOS implementations that supported normal DOS 
applications, but used task switching methods to run them for multiple 
users.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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