PalmDOS

In 1992 Digital Research, still under its old name but already bought by Novell in July 1991, also embarked on a spin-off product code-named "Merlin" and later released as NetWare PalmDOS 1, which, as its name implies, was a very resource-light DR DOS 6.0 derivative aimed at the emerging Palmtop/PDA market.

PalmDOS was the first operating system in the family to sport the new BDOS 7.0 kernel with native DOS compatible internal data structures instead of emulations thereof. Replacing the DOS emulation on top of a CP/M kernel by a true DOS compatible kernel helped a lot in improving compatibility with some applications using some of DOS' internal data structures and also was the key in reducing the resident size of the kernel code even further—a particular requirement for the PDA market. On the other hand, introducing a genuine Current Directory Structure (CDS) imposed a limit on the depth of working directories down to 66 characters (as in MS-DOS/PC DOS), whereas previous issues of DR DOS had no such limitation due to their internal organization of directories as relative links to parent directories instead of as absolute paths. PalmDOS still reported itself as "PC DOS 3.31" to applications in order to keep the kernel small and not run into compatibility problems with Windows, which would expect the DOSMGR API to be implemented for any DOS version since 5.0.

As well as a ROM-executing kernel, PalmDOS had palmtop-type support for features such as PCMCIA PC Cards (with DPMS support), power management (BatteryMAX and the $IDLE$ device driver with its patented dynamic idle detection by Gross and John P. Constant), MINIMAX task switcher support for PIM (Personal Information Modules) applications stored and executed from ROM via XIP (Execute-In-Place), etc.

The PCMCIA stack for PalmDOS was partially written by Ian H. S. Cullimore.