Standalone program

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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.