>Going back to the original point, I remember finding it interesting how >if you booted Win9x natively it pretty much took over the environment >and DOS all but disappeared, however if you booted into MS-DOS mode and >then ran "win", DOS was still there in the background (just not being >used if you had all native Windows drivers). In that case when you >chose the option to shut down Windows, instead of getting the "It's now >safe to turn off your computer" screen, it would return you back to the >DOS prompt, just the way Win3.1 used to work.
I believe the "it is now safe to turn off your computer" screen was actually just a DOS executable that ran after Windows exited if Windows had launched at boot, and I think what executable to run (or whether to just go to a DOS prompt) was configurable (not sure though, my Win3/Win95 retrocomputing box is disassembled at the moment). In any case Win9x was certainly a DOS-based system (though in more and more of a "grandfathers axe" or "ship of Theseus" sort of way as it evolved from 95 to 98 to ME). In 95, at the very least, Windows was launched from DOS whether by the user or at boot time, and real-mode DOS remained resident and continued to be called for various services, even if the hardware was completely driven by native Windows drivers. Aside from that, there remained a significant amount of Win16 code in the system, and the whole system, all the way up to Windows ME, was the result of incremental, kludge-by-kludge additions to DOS. Win9x was basically just DOS plus an overgrown DOS extender, even if by the end there was more extender and less DOS, it belonged solidly in the DOS family. Even Windows NT, though it shared the Win32 API with Win9x at the application level, was nothing like it at the kernel level. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
