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DOS was and is an absolutely tiny operating system. The job of an OS is to act as an intermediary between you and the hardware. Sometimes, having stuff betwee
by amalcon 10y ago
DOS was and is an absolutely tiny operating system. The job of an OS is to act as an intermediary between you and the hardware.
Sometimes, having stuff between you and the hardware is a problem. DOS lets you basically just use the hardware directly, so it can make sense for some types of control systems or firmware updaters.
- wtallis 10y agoIt's really not ideal for either purpose, though. Control systems can use a much richer RTOS rather than building on DOS and implementing an RTOS within the application. Firmware updating only happens on DOS because Microsoft isn't interested in accommodating that use case with Windows. It is increasingly common to see firmware update boot images based on Linux, which has no trouble offering access to those low-level interfaces while still having a modern feature set.