Condescension on HN??!? I guess it's the way those boards all end up. People give their two cents on things they often doesn't research about, armchairs critics on work done by proven researchers. Kinda depressing though because lot's of brilliant people work these things out and we end up with BS comments like these ones instead of some deserved "Wow".
This absolutly got my attention, going to check for sure. I'm older, and when I was in school we learn OS with Minix, a port of UNIX on the 8086 architecture. But this is so much more!
Believe it or not, I considered Minix for this project, as I did BSD and BareMetal OS. In the end, "some Linux" won, and at this time only Tiny Core Linux roughly estimates the ease of a Debian-like repository system to support server-building scripts, while still being a minute distro (under 10MB without the Levinux parts) and not being a hard drive install while still offering persistence... well, the list goes on. It was a very tall order I was trying to fill, and at the time, the QEMU+Tiny Core Linux combo nicely fits the bill.
Using Windows 3.x as the example OS would have been a more sensible choice then 95. Windows 95 is way more than a "wrap per" over DOS"! Windows 3.x had way more dependency with DOS than Windows 95 had! Windows 3.x had to offer a "collaborative" way of doing multitasking, each task had to yield to the OS in order for it to Check what any other task had to process in it's message loop, if you wanted to freeze the OS all you had to do was to not call the yield function. Windows 95 supported a preemptive scheme that wasn't there before Back then (kinda like NT did support).
