Date: Sun, 9 Feb 2020 08:41:11 +0000 From: Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve@sohara.org> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Re updating BIOS Message-ID: <20200209084111.8d9764a128bab47ee1c19a86@sohara.org> In-Reply-To: <202002090809.01989xgi025440@sdf.org> References: <202002090809.01989xgi025440@sdf.org>
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On Sun, 09 Feb 2020 02:09:59 -0600 Scott Bennett <bennett@sdf.org> wrote: > The first part of the above, mispunctuated pair of sentences is > correct, but the latter part is not. FreeDOS, like PC-DOS and MSDOS > before it, is/was not an operating system, but rather a more primitive > creature known as a monitor system. The DOS part of those names is an abbreviation of 'Disc Operating System' - clearly at the time they were considered operating systems even though they started life as near clones of CP/M (Control Program/Monitor). IBM 360 mainframes didn't have virtual memory, processes or any of the protections you mentioned, it didn't even have anything that would be recognised as a filesystem today (it had record oriented datasets) - but OS360 was definitely considered an operating system. [MS/PC/DR/Free]DOS was a lot more like a mainframe batch operating system than a multi-user multi-tasking operating system such as Multics or unix, but hijacking the term operating system to mean only the latterm, and that only with hardware supported isolation mechanisms is revisionist. I recall working on a unix(ish) system in the late 1980s that didn't have hardware memory mapping or protection, or even fsck which made recovering from (the frequent) crashes rather tedious (icheck, ncheck ...). -- Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve@sohara.org>
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