[TUHS] MS-DOS

[Derek Fawcus]

On Fri, Jul 01, 2016 at 08:47:01AM -0400, William Cheswick wrote:
> 
> Actually, MS-DOS was a runtime system, not an operating system, despite the last two letters of its name.
> This is a term of art lost to antiquity.
> Run time systems offered a minimum of features: a loader, a file system, a crappy, built-in shell,
> I/O for keyboards, tape, screens, crude memory management, etc. No multiuser, no network stacks, no separate processes (mostly). DEC had several (RT11, RSTS, RSX) and the line is perhaps a little fuzzy: they were getting operating-ish.

I seem to recall a whole bunch of DOS's for different systems in the early 80's,
where the term seemed to be used in the sense of a System for Operating a Disk.

DF