Comment by Jotalea
9 days ago
To me, an OS is a piece of software that can boot in a computer without requiring anything from another OS as host, and allows running programs bundled with the OS (like Paint on windows 1.1), and if supported, 3rd party programs.
Yes, and a lot of people feel that way, but that's 'booting', or 'bootstrap'. A program like that is what I might call a bootable application. It's just not what an OS is. "Operating System" has quite a clear meaning, being software that assists the general operation of the computer. If it's not capable of running general programs then it's not an Operating System.