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sterlingphoenix t1_ja2vuck wrote

Reply to comment by speculatrix in ELI5: in MS-DOS there were not-interchangeable audio cards and we had to manually select it to get sound, otherwise there was none at all. When and why this stopped being a problem? by 3RBlank

> 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...

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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.

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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.

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