Technical Details
The following description applies to DOS/360 except as otherwise noted. Later versions offer additional functionality.
Because DOS/360 was designed to run on low-end System/360 models memory usage was a concern. It was possible to generate a DOS supervisor, the resident portion of the operating system, as small as 5902 bytes. Detailed charts listed memory requirements for each sysgen option, often as little as 100 bytes. A minimum system would leave just over 10KB of storage available for a single batch partition which was enough to run utilities and all compilers but COBOL and full FORTRAN IV. To keep memory usage as small as possible, DOS was coded entirely in assembly language.
Read more about this topic: DOS/360 And Successors
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