The system was built on the successor of Digital Research's DR DOS 6.0 (BDOS level 6.7 and 7.1) and NetWare PalmDOS 1.0 (code named "Merlin", BDOS level 7.0), Novell's DR DOS "Panther" as a fully PC DOS compatible 16-bit disk operating system (with genuinely DOS compatible internal data structures) for bootstrapping, media access, device drivers and file system support.