Hi, On Mon, 27 Dec 2021 at 14:36, Liam Proven <lpro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 26 Dec 2021 at 22:19, Aitor Santamaría <aitor...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > Why DOS386.EXE (later renamed to VMM32.VXD) would run "on top" of DOS > and not be DOS itself, the natural way DOS adapts to a 386? > > Just because, for commercial reasons, Microsoft never sold this DOS > unbundled from their GUI, I don't see this to be part of Windows, but DOS. > > This is a red herring. It isn't what you think it is. It's not a > multitasking add-on for DOS; it's a component of Windows. > I disagree. In "Undercover Windows 95" the author shows how you can rename COMMAND.COM into KRNL386.EXE and actually have a DOS (not windows) with preemptive multitasking and virtual memory. If I recall correctly, he builds a DOS program that uses XMS to get memory, and DOS386 (or VMM32 if you like) manages to give it more memory than the actual physical RAM memory the machine had. Not GUI (Windows) at all, just pure DOS. > Windows has DOS multitasking long before Windows 3. There was a > special 386 edition of Windows 2.01 that also could multitask DOS > apps: > http://oldcomputermuseum.com/os/windows_386_v2.10.html > > I think this is what I am talking about. > > (and if it isn't, where is the technical limit? EMM386.EXE is more alike > to VMM32.VXD than to MSDOS.SYS) > > But this is still Windows and not DOS. You are again confusing product > lines. > > No, DOS multitasking was not some separate function that could be > extracted from Windows and made stand-alone. It was an integral part > of Windows right back to Windows/386. Windows 3 did not introduce > Well, as said above, this has precisely been proved to be extracted from Windows and used for stand-alone DOS environment. Just because it is called VMM32.VXD (and not the original DOS386.EXE name), and has been sold just with Windows, and not DOS, does not mean it is an un-dettachable part of Windows. To the same extent that if HIMEM hadn't ever been sold with MS-DOS, does not mean it is not an extension of DOS. Aitor
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