alt Hacker NewsTSR stands for Terminate and Stay Resident, a distinct behaviour for DOS era programs, which would usually run to completion and exit.
TSR stands for Terminate and Stay Resident, a distinct behaviour for DOS era programs, which would usually run to completion and exit.
To expand upon this - the TSR programs stayed in memory after being loaded. Typical use were drivers, for example mouse driver. It loaded, hooked itself in the interrupt table and then exited back to DOS prompt. And this gave you mouse support for other programs.
Wikipedia has some details, if you are interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate-and-stay-resident_pr...