winscape 2234

No, I don't suppose you would.

I picked Mini Unix as an example because it seems to me to be a counter-example to GregM's opinion about what OSs should do, not because of its other attributes. The choice was not intended to exemplify a typical OS - that was not the point of the discussion. Choosing a specialised time-sharing OS would also be inappropriate for that purpose.

If you are saying that the OS being responsible for initiating I-O including specifying the destination address amounts to "memory management", then you are thinking of something a lot less sophisticated that I am. Did you know that some variants of OS-360 sometimes required the user to allocate buffer space and tell the OS where it was? This happened when the user, for efficiency reasons, wanted physical I-O to be done a whole track at a time, not just one logical record at a time. The OS would still deliver one record in response to a read request, but would not allocate the memory for the track-sized buffer.

Actually, I tend to the view that MS DOS should not be thought of as an OS. It's just runtime support for application programs.

Oh, I've looked at many such since I got my first programming job in 1962. I think it's you who needs a broader view.

But in this case the spec does not make adequate provision for recovery after an error. That's a fault that no amount of implementation can avoid.

--brian

-- "What's life? Life's easy. A quirk of matter. Nature's way of keeping meat fresh."