Great insights! Your comment also made me wonder what actually happened to ELKS. Last I checked (many years ago, apparently), it seemed abandoned. But developm

Great insights! Your comment also made me wonder what actually happened to ELKS. Last I checked (many years ago, apparently), it seemed abandoned. But development has started again in 2014, and still seems ongoing: https://github.com/jbruchon/elks https://github.com/jbruchon/elks Should play with it some time, maybe in an 8086 emulator. EDIT: By the way: I forgot to mention this in my other comment: > The core of it is a smart linker/loader which allows code and data segments to be loaded, patched together on the fly, and dropped on demand. All data is relocatable, allowing it to be rearranged or swapped out. Early Windows on early XTs did that, too! With all sorts of crazy hacks to make it happen [1]. I don't know how it compared to what GEOS did, though. [1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110316-00/?p=11203 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110316-00/?p=... and many other articles on that site can send you down a deep rabbit hole.