>> 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"?

Well, I suppose you could rephase it that way. Either way, Windows 3.11 
was no "operating system". It was an MS-DOS application program.

>> If you write Windows, you go back to DOS.
> 
>   What does that even mean?

I meant to write "quit Windows".

>> 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.)

Yeah, that's true enough - especially since after you change some 
settings, you can never quite be sure if MS-DOS let alone Windows will 
still work. Plus you need to see all those error messages scroll past as 
you boot the machine, so you if everything went OK - and if not, which 
parts failed.

[I recall it used to be a Big Deal whether "extended memory" got enabled 
or not. I knew a guy who even had a whole book devoted to "taking your 
PC beyong 640KB". I don't know what the difference between "conventional 
memory" and "extended memory" is or was, but this "problem" seems to 
have entirely gone away now...]

>> 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.

AFAIK, it supports running several applications at once. Only one of 
them can actually "do" anything at a time, but you can have several 
applications "started". (Demonstrated by, e.g., writing a short program 
that prints out numbers, and then switching to another window and seeing 
the first program stop printing until you switch back.)

>> 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".

Well, a PC that has Windows 95 also has MS-DOS, and you can freely 
switch between the two...

>> 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?

...whereas a PC running Windows NT4 does not, usually, have MS-DOS at 
all. Many people asked "where's the 'exit to DOS' button gone?" The 
answer being "MS-DOS is a completely several OS and you would have to 
reboot to exit WinNT to get to it".

>   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.

Does Win9x run in protected mode? [This isn't rhetorical - I can't 
actually remember.]

Certainly WinNT introduced security. Win9x can be made to show a login 
prompt, but you can just cancel it if you don't feel like logging in. 
You then have unlimited access to every file on the local machine.

>> 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?

IIRC, even something as trivial as getting a CD-ROM drive to work 
[assuming you were rich enough to afford one] used to be quite 
challengine. I can remember stumbling across cyclic load-dependency 
chains before now.

>> 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.

I have little personal experience, but I recall that back in the old 
days, getting PC software to work tended to be *very* difficult. (Most 
especially games, but any large application such as Word tended to be 
tricky to set up.)

Maybe it was because the hardware wasn't up to much. Maybe it was 
because MS-DOS is so primitive. I'm not really sure...

Certainly on the Amiga scene, "installing" a program usually meant 
putting the floppy into the drive and clicking an icon. A tiny few 
programs required you to actually copy a font file to your system disk 
or something, and usually had extensive and meticulous instructions 
explaining exactly how to do this, in language even a 5 year old could 
follow. Either that or the application got ignored in favour of 
better-documented alternative apps...

[It was only very late into the party that Amiga programs started to 
have "installers", and these were usually just DOS scripts that perform 
some minimal checks before copying a few files. Uninstallers appeared 
even later. Generally this kind of thing just wasn't necessary, because 
installation was so simple...]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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