Lane J. Bryson wrote:
> I did. Prove it wrong on its own merits:
>
> "It just has to manage the memory, peripherals, and
> hopefully do something useful to qualify under a strict definition,
> which is all anyone can argue anyway."
>
>
What the hell kind of definition is that? According to your definition
every device driver I've written is an Operating System. Are you sure
that you are not a member of the Microsoft legal team? You, obviously,
have no intricate knowledge of anything technical to make such a
statement and call it a "strict" definition.
I would better say that the sole property of the Operating System itself
is quite small. It must bootstrap the machine, arrange physical memory
for the purposes of running its own functions and those that would be
imposed upon it, allow for the creation of a filesystem of some sort
(not that disks are necessary for this task) that is able to handle data
in some format, and the core organization of peripherals and their I/O.
Display, directories, device drivers, and applications are all seperate
from the OS.
There are many embedded OS's in smaller devices, and many mre to come,
that have no display, nothing bundled, and you would not even know they
were there. Your TV is one good example. Having worked for Philips at
one point in time, I was amazed at the amount of programming that was
done to run a TV set. You get the on screen menus and other info, all
via-a-vis embedded chips. Whether or not these would fit into the
definition of an OS is wholly dependant on their function. It is my
suggestion that you go take a good course in OS theory at a local
college and stop reading Windoze Magazine.
Paul Anderson
--
"Good morning, doctors. I have taken the liberty of removing
Windows 95 from my hard drive."
Arthur C Clarke, author of 2001:A Space Odyssey, on the first words
he would have liked HAL, his fictional computer, to speak
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