>>40
Nope. To quote the book I mentioned,
The operating system interacts directly with the hardware, providing common services to programs and insulating them from hardware idiosyncrasies. Viewing the system as a set of layers, the operating system is commonly called the system kernel, or just the kernel, emphasizing its isolation from user programs.
This is followed by a nice diagram showing this model.
I'm pretty sure Tanenbaum defined an operating system as the program that manages resources or something like that, but I can't find that definition anywhere (can anyone help me out here?).
Instead, here's a quote from
Operating System Essentials (after mentioning the ``operating system = kernel + application programs'' definition):
A more common definition, and the one that we usually follow, is that the operating system is the one program running at all times on the computer—usually called the kernel. (Along with the kernel, there are two other types of programs: systems programs, which are associated with the operating system but are not part of the kernel, and application programs, which include all programs not associated with the operation of the system.)
Of course, I'm happy to accept that words change over time. I'm not a prescriptivist, and I'm okay with ``operating system'' meaning what Richard Stallman thinks it means in the same way I'm okay with ``hacker'' meaning computer criminal. Semantic change, and all that.