[gjm11]

> All of this normal stuff that an Operating System does was well established ... to a certain extent, on the BBC Micro.

The BBC micro's operating system had no networking to speak of, certainly not TCP/IP as we know it, no user permission things (indeed, no concept of users at all), and no cron jobs (indeed, no OS scheduling of tasks at all). In other words, not one of the things you specifically called out as "normal stuff that an Operating System does".

(There was a networking system, called Econet, but it wasn't part of the base OS; you needed an extra ROM -- physically plugged into the circuit board, those were the days -- that implemented it.)

For the avoidance of doubt: I loved the Acorn MOS and hated MS-DOS. But it simply isn't true that the BBC Micro had those features and MS-DOS didn't. And, for what it's worth, I see nothing wrong with calling either of them an operating system.