Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Well, I can say with authority that Windows 3.11 was simply an 
> application program that runs under MS-DOS.

  Don't you mean "over"? If you say "under" you are effectively saying
that the underlying system was Windows 3.11, and you ran DOS on top of
it. Clearly you meant the other way around: The underlying system was DOS,
and Windows ran on top of it.

> If you write Windows, you go back to DOS.

  What does that even mean?

> When you start the PC, it boots DOS first, and then runs 
> Windows.

  Actually, especially in the early days of Windows 3, it was quite
common for systems to boot to DOS, period. When you wanted to start
windows you wrote "win". Only few people added that "win" to the end
of their autoexec.bat. (I assume this was more common at workplaces
where Windows3 was used for everything.)

> And Windows 3.11 was litle more than a GUI with window movement 
> capabilities and icon management. [Why would you want several windows in 
> an OS that doesn't support multitasking?]

  But Windows 3 does support multitasking. Granted, it's not pre-emptive,
but it's still multitasking.

> IIRC, Win95 and Win98 (and WinME?) are slightly thicker layers over the 
> top of MS-DOS

  That's debatable. While the boot process of Win95 and Win98 do indeed
run config.sys and autoexec.bat, as DOS did, it's a matter of definition
whether this is "booting to DOS" or simply "the booting process of Win9x
processes those two files at startup".

  Some people claimed that Win9x had the exact same system as DOS+Win3
with the exception that it boots directly to Windows without ever starting
command.com. Others claimed that the process was just part of the normal
startup of Win9x, and there was no DOS involved per se. (When you chose
the "boot to DOS" option, the only difference between a normal boot is
that at some point the booting process branches to the DOS side.)

  But Win9x was indeed somewhat of a hybrid at best.

> and it was WinNT that finally replaced DOS with a *real* 
> OS with actual *features* such as security, multitasking, hardware 
> abstraction, etc.

  "Replaced DOS" in which context? WinNT was a completely separate
alternative, not an "upgrade". Why are you even comparing it to DOS?

  As for hardware abstraction, what was the basic difference between
the hardware management in NT and the one in Win98? Remember that Win98
already had DirectX (if I'm not mistaken even DirectX 9.0c will work on
Win98). You can't get much more abstract than that with respect to hardware
in Windows.

  And as I said, Windows 3 already had multitasking.

> Ooo, ooo, remember TSRs? Remember spending hours editing C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT 
> and C:\CONFIG.SYS to try all permutations of driver loading order 
> looking for one that actually functioned?

  Are you confusing it with trying to optimize the drivers so that most
of them would be loaded in himem?

> Somewhere on the Internet, there's an MP3 of "Microsoft Jinglebells" 
> where a guy laments that "I've sat here installing Word since breakfast 
> yesterday". Certainly it used to really *be* like that!

  Was that a problem with the OS or one with the hardware? Word was a
rather big program even back then.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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