I remember back in the early days – from Mach on black hardware through Openstep on 4 different architectures – the folks from NeXT were always very careful to use the phrase "system software" when referring to the whole thing and only using the phrase "operating system" when referring to the layer that supports basic functions like scheduling tasks, invoking user-space code, and controlling peripherals.
This is one of the things I appreciated of them back then, as they were respectful of the nomenclature actually used in computer science.
Now I realize that the phrase "operating system" commonly receives slight colloquial abuse to refer to everything inside the shrinkwrap, but I think the formal meaning hasn't completely died yet, so nirvana should be allowed to use it properly if he so desires.
Ok, but Darwin is the operating system.
I remember back in the early days – from Mach on black hardware through Openstep on 4 different architectures – the folks from NeXT were always very careful to use the phrase "system software" when referring to the whole thing and only using the phrase "operating system" when referring to the layer that supports basic functions like scheduling tasks, invoking user-space code, and controlling peripherals.
This is one of the things I appreciated of them back then, as they were respectful of the nomenclature actually used in computer science.
Now I realize that the phrase "operating system" commonly receives slight colloquial abuse to refer to everything inside the shrinkwrap, but I think the formal meaning hasn't completely died yet, so nirvana should be allowed to use it properly if he so desires.