Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

speculatrix t1_ja2rhuw wrote

DOS was barely an operating system, in the true sense.

If you look at the windows kernel and the core system libraries and tools, they provide key features such as device drivers, process separation, memory management, storage and file systems. The device drivers allow different devices from different manufacturers to be controlled in a common way at the application layer. So to some extent it doesn't matter which sound card you have. Obviously, some have more features, but the base level of functionality is the same: make stereo sound.

DOS didn't do much of that, except the filing system, keyboard and character console. Each application had to have its own drivers for sound, hi-res graphics and even a mouse! Some hardware became a standard due to popularity, and were supported by many applications.

7

JetScootr t1_ja2xpob wrote

>DOS was barely an operating system, in the true sense

Everything you said is correct, but perhaps you're underplaying just how limited the hardware was in the DOS days. DOS, and its forerunner CPM, were squeezed down into (sometimes) as little as 4 or 8 thousand bytes of RAM, plus about that much ROM (not kilobytes. ANd what's a megabyte?).

PS before I start a flame war: CPM was the conceptual forerunner of QDos, which was the actual code forerunner of MS Dos.

PPS before my PS starts a flame war:QDOS

6

speculatrix t1_ja2y85t wrote

Yes, I know. I lived through that.

At one time I was writing assembler for four bit microcontrollers.

My first computer had 4K of RAM, and 8K of ROM and cassette tape storage.

My smart watch has millions of times more flash/rom.

3

sterlingphoenix t1_ja2vuck wrote

> DOS was barely an operating system, in the true sense.

I mean you may be OK saying "compared to modern operating systems", but it was a perfectly adequate OS for the time. Windows wasn't an actual OS until Windows 98...

4

speculatrix t1_ja2xp3z wrote

Unix and other real operating systems existed at the time.

DOS was basically just a fancy bootloader, a thin layer above the bios, with very basic filing system (early versions of DOS/FAT didn't even support directories!)

No processes or threads, no memory management, no separation of OS vs user space, almost no device drivers, no semaphores or locking, no network, no logging.

Just a single character based console.

8

sterlingphoenix t1_ja3867y wrote

DOS did everything you'd expect an OS to do in the consumer space. It wasn't supposed to compete with the commercial space.

If you want to go full UNIX, I definitely don't think you can call Windows a "real" OS, either. And I mean until the late 2000s.

3