On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 10:47 AM Bonaventura de'Vidovich <i...@bonaventura.com> wrote: > > Win 3.11 is a interface, in that case DOS is the real operative system. > Win95 is an operative system (no comment). There is no DOS.
Er, no. Win 3.1 was a multi-tasking, 16 bit, protected mode shell running on top of DOS, and using DOS to perform file system operations. It required a 386 processor. Win 3.1 serialized access to DOS functions. You could choose not to run Win 3.1, and boot to a pure real mode DOS session. I did this routinely. I had a Unix machine at home before I got a DOS PC. I went looking for DOS software to provide stuff I was used to on Unix. I found a commercial package called the4 MKS Toolkit. The Toolkit provided versions of all of the Unix commands and utilities that made sense under a single-user, single tasking OS. Big wins for me qwere full versions of the Unix Korn Shell and vi editor. The Korn shell implemented everything save asynchronous background processes, because DOS didn't do that. Installed in fullest Unix compatibility mode, the Toolkit replaced COMMAND.COM as the boot shell with INIT.EXE. Init ran and printed a Login: prompt on the screen. Provide a userid and (optional) password. and INIT called LOGIN, which checked to see if the ID existed in a Unix compatible /etc/passwd file. If it did, it changed to whatever was specified as that ID's home directory, and ran whatever was specified as that ID's shell. I had MKS IDs to run the MKS Korn Shell, vanilla COMMAND.COM, 4DOS, and DesqView. Exit whatever was defined as the ID's shell and INIT resp;awned and printed Login: on the terminal. I could completely change operating environments *without* rebooting the PC. (Drivers for things like my mouse, RAMdisk, and disk cache were loaded from CONFIG.SYS before INIT ran, and were common to all environments.) When Win3.1 joined the party, Toolkit use expanded. Win3.1 used Program Manager as the default shell, but you could change that. An entry in the Win3.1 SYSTEM.INI file controlled what Win3.1 used as the shell. I had an assortment of Win3.1 Program Manager replacements I played with. I had MKS IDs for them, and logging on with that ID copied a version of the SYSTEM.INI file specifying the shell I wanted over the master copy, and Win3.1 ran using it. It worked fine. Win95 was similar in concept, but it represented the beginning moves to a full 32 bit virtual mode OS not requiring DOS. DOS was still present, and you could open a DOS window on Win95 and perform DOS command line functions, but only one real mode session could be run at a time.. Win98 also used DOS, but DOS was strictly a real mode loader for the OS. Once Win98 was up and running, it performed all functions, and DOS was out of the loop. (You could run a real mode DOS session in a windows as you could with Win96, but again, only one at a time. WinNT completed the transition away from DOS, and introduced the NTFS file system, Win2K was the first consumer OS that offered it by default. (IIRC, it was technically possible to run Win2K on top of FAT32, but doing so wasn't recommended. ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
