nemesis wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> How recently has UNIX not used source distributions for programs? How
>> much UNIX shareware could you download as executables, say, in 1998?
> 
> I don't quite understand how this has to do with anything in the discussion.
> But source has always been available in some way or another in the *nix
> community.
> 
>> DOS, Win98, WinXP.
> 
> Win9x did not support DOS programs: they simply had DOS included to handle
> those.  So, basically, M$ can afford backwards compatibility by simply letting
> old code handle old code, because old code everyone's using is M$ code, not
> someone's else.  Single vendor, single solution.
> 

IIRC Win95 ran on MS-DOS 7.  It actually booted to DOS and then loaded 
windows.  The reboot to DOS only set up the environment customized to 
the application you were trying to run.

The same went for Win98 & ME.  Just that DOS become less and less 
important.  But I remember that they all ran on top of DOS.



Tom

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