No—DOS is an OS. He’s talking about incorporating device drivers into applications. No OS on the machine at all.
I'm pretty sure one could do that in DOS.
Essentially an OS could be written into an app to take over the machine.
Though provoking article. I guess I’d have three points.
1. If the number of connections coming into a web server becomes too large, then just spawn multiple instances (probably virtual) and then load balance between them. In other words this really may not be as real a problem as the article would have you believe.
2. Running apps on bare metal - I mean you could do it but you’d have to reinvent a lot of wheels like memory management, tcp/ip stacks, disk i/o, semaphores and locks and the list goes on. At some point someone would say I can do all that low level stuff for you and you can focus on your app - so you’d be back to a kernel of one sort or another in pretty short order.
What might be interesting is to have a control plane that runs on top of a conventional kernel and a data plane that bypasses all that stuff and just retrieves the data. Not completely sure how that would work but I could roughly speaking imagine that.
3. The other practical thing that could be done is to try to optimize the pressure points in the existing kernels. Find a way to do lookups in constant or log time instead of O(N). This approach will likely happen.
Funny how things come full circle. Didn't Wordstar used to come with all its printer drivers?