As far as DOS being out of the loop, I was young and not yet interested in the technical details when Win9x (including ME) was still a going concern, but my understanding in more recent years as to why Win9x was so unstable has been that whether or not DOS proper was in control of the system, there was still data and code down in conventional memory that would cause windows to crash if it was scribbled over, and that data was mapped in the lower megabyte of every process, even Win32 processes, so that a buggy application could nuke the whole system. From what I understand, Win9x was basically a Win16 implementation (including a DPMI server) and Win32 was basically implemented as a DPMI client TSR that provided the Win32 API to applications, and then called the Win16 API as the actual backend to draw stuff on screen (thus the GDI heap exhaustion problem). Is that more or less correct? As for the worth of having Win16 vs Win9x as a whole open sourced, I agree. Win16 was quite a pile of crap itself, but there aren't a lot of options available for running applications that were only released for that platform available today. Both NTVDM and Wine have so-so implementations of it, and it would be good to have a source release of original Microsoft code that dedicated retrocomputing projects could use to create their own modern implementations. But there are implementations of Win32 under active development today that are of much higher quality than what Win9x provided, both proprietary (Win10), and open source (Wine), so open sourcing Win9x in its entirety is a very low priority. Open sourcing the Win16 implementation in Win9x might be worthwhile just to have a broad spectrum of Win16 implementations (Win3, Win9x, NTVDM) for retrocomputing projects to use as example code, but FreeDOS provides a better DOS implementation than Win9x does, and Win10 and Wine provide better Win32 implementations.
-------- Original message -------- From: dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> Date: 9/26/2019 11:14 (GMT-06:00) To: "Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS." <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] Source code to Windows 9x and ME... On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 11:22 AM Michael C Robinson <mich...@robinson-west.com> wrote: > > I don't have a few million, but a group able to cobble together a few > million is more realistic to put together. Where "realistic" is "extremely unlikely" instead of "totally impossible" > Question is, how much would membership cost in a group whose goal is > to GPL Windows 16 and 32 bit be? Say such a group came into existence > and a million people joined for $20/month. Can you get $DEITY to work a miracle to get those million folks to sign up? That's about what would be required. > The first target, Windows > 16 bit land. Then, the 32 bit version of Windows including 9x and ME. > Eventually, the group would be able to open source the MS-DOS based > versions of Windows completely and membership fees could be reduced or > even dropped. Maybe the source code isn't needed, maybe just the > interfaces and the design are needed. Win3.X->Win9X were multitasking shells running on top of DOS. But the need for DOS decreased as development continued. By the time Win98 hit the streets, DOS was a real mode loader for Win98, and once Win98 was running, DOS was out of the loop. Win98 was the OS, and it handled things like accessing the file system DOS was previously used for. Speaking as someone who had to support Win9X in the workplace, and spent *way* too much time beating it into submission, I was *delighted* when Win2k arrived and I could run an N T version of Windows with NTFS as the file system. My Win2K machine was up 24/7 and Just Ran. I only rebooted if I was fiddling with hardware or installing something that required it. My last Win98SE installation reached the point where I was rebooting four or five times a day, and this is *with* me doing my best to keep a clean uncluttered installation. The problem was resources. Microsoft allocated them as part of the GDI heap, and they held stuff like what was displayed on your screen. But the amount allocated was fixed - in Win3.X is was two 64K heaps. In Win9X it was one 128K heap, This was true no matter how much RAM you had installed. Programs would allocate resources when they ran but not always free them whrn they exited. (Microsoff Excel was a Worst Offender about this.) When Windows thought resources were exhausted, a reboot was required. I wouldn't mind an environment that supported old 16bit stuff from in3.X. There really isn't anything I can think of from Win9X I care about. I'm afraid I wouldn't join the crowdfunding effort. My response to Win9X these days is "Run Away! Run Away!" ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
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