Standalone program

Standalone program

In early computers, standalone program was a computer program designed to run on a computer without an operating system. Standalone programs had to be loaded by the same booting procedure that is also used to load an operating system.

Standalone programs typically were provided for utility functions such as disk formatting. Also, computers with very limited storage used standalone programs, i.e. most computers until the mid 1950s, and later still embedded processors.

Nowadays, standalone programs are a nearly extinct species of programs. Even the most basic processors these days have sufficient storage to allow the operating system overhead, and if this is still a problem, basic general purpose operating systems are available for that purpose. E.g. in the diskette era, apparently standalone utility programs were delivered with a basic version of DOS fitting onto the same diskette.


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Нужно сделать НИР?

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Standalone software — A standalone program is any program that is run in a standalone PC. It may be an application program or any system program.However this distinction does not stand up to scrutiny outside the context of certain embedded systems, since the computer… …   Wikipedia

  • Standalone server — Standalone servers are compilations of programs that run on a single PC, but emulates what the same set of programs will do when run on a server over the Internet. They usually contain a web server (such as the Apache HTTP Server), one or more… …   Wikipedia

  • Discovery Program — Not to be confused with Space Shuttle Discovery. NASA s Discovery Program (as compared to New Frontiers, Explorers, or Flagship Programs) is a series of lower cost, highly focused American scientific space missions that are exploring the Solar… …   Wikipedia

  • National Industrial Security Program — The National Industrial Security Program, or NISP, is the nominal authority (in the United States) for managing the needs of private industry to access classified information. The NISP was established in 1993 by Executive Order 12829.[1] The… …   Wikipedia

  • X display manager (program type) — For the program called X Display Manager , see XDM (display manager). In the X Window System, an X display manager runs as a program that allows the starting of a session on an X server from the same or another computer. A login screen shown by… …   Wikipedia

  • Today (NBC program) — The Today Show redirects here. For other programming called Today , see Today (disambiguation). Today Today title shot as of September 2009 Genre News Talk …   Wikipedia

  • Great Observatories program — Four Great Observatories satellites NASA s series of Great Observatories satellites are four large, powerful space based telescopes. Each of the Great Observatories has had a similar size and cost at program outset, and each has made a… …   Wikipedia

  • Objective Individual Combat Weapon program — See XM29 OICW for more information on that subset of the overall program The Objective Individual Combat Weapon or OICW refers to the next generation service rifle competition that was under development as part of the United States Army OICW… …   Wikipedia

  • New Millennium Program — (NMP) is a NASA project with focus on engineering validation of new technologies for space applications. Funding for the program was eliminated from the FY2009 budget by the 110th United States Congress, effectively leading to its… …   Wikipedia

  • One-liner program — A one liner is textual input to the command line of an operating system shell that performs some function in just one line of input. The one liner can be An expression written in the language of the shell. The invocation of an interpreter… …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”