It did, until it no longer did. With DOS and Win9x one could effectively replace everything underfoot of the OS and it would hardly blink. Yes it would fall ba

It did, until it no longer did. With DOS and Win9x one could effectively replace everything underfoot of the OS and it would hardly blink. Yes it would fall back to 640x480 and 16 colors, and demand you install some new drivers, but beyond that you could do just about anything and it would still boot. Come NT and you would just be greeted with a error screen and a demand that you did a recovery (that would effectively roll back all patches etc). And these days you have to phone Microsoft if you try anything like it more than a couple times because you tripped their DRM checks. Yes, one could wander into a solid case of "my grandfathers axe". But the various layers were independent enough that they would come up in some kind of state that you could work with. Sadly i fear that Linux is heading into the NT realm with the changes to the graphics sub-system that has come in recent years. Where before higher modes were the realm of X, and things like 3D acceleration was yet another semi-independent layer, these days the kernel may well give you an error if you do not have the right GPU driver compiled in.