Comment Re:More useless crap (Score 1) 37
It depends on what you consider the core OS. How many device drivers do you need before you consider it an operating system? How many DLL files used by many (but not all) applications are needed to qualify as a core operating system?
Early operating systems were strictly supervisors, responsible for scheduling and dispatching "jobs", and controlling access to shared resources. It was not expected that they would provide application frameworks. I would not be at all surprised if you could create a heavily stripped down Windows 7, paired with application virtualization tools (such as ThinApp) where the operating system would be very small, and almost all bloat required for individual applications isolated separately in application packages. Would you consider those packages to be part of the core operating system?