What was the role of MS-DOS in Windows 95?

Sucking the brains out of DOS

/dev/null — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 09:38:36 GMT

I read Raymond Chen's blog from time to time, somewhat because he's a really conversational writer, and somewhat because he's got lots of interesting things to say about the history of Windows. I was amused by this post about MS-DOS...

re: What was the role of MS-DOS in Windows 95?

Miral — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 11:53:09 GMT

"Until you enable PAE, then the physical address space is expanded to 36-bit."

I've enabled PAE on my Vista 32-bit box with 4GB physical RAM, and it can still only see 3GB. So I'm calling shenanigans.

And BTW, Raymond, I think you're getting pingback spam. Just a hunch. :)

re: What was the role of MS-DOS in Windows 95?

SRS — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 23:50:52 GMT

If you think that win 3.1 was just a simple shell over DOS, it's instructive to do some research on win386.exe (remember 386-Enhanced mode, anyone?). The vmm + numerous vxds inside win386.exe were a new protected mode OS that certainly wasn't DOS - we just didn't know it at the time...

re: What was the role of MS-DOS in Windows 95?

Gazpacho — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 21:22:24 GMT

Warn off the Slashdot trolls, get spammed. It's a no-win situation.

re: What was the role of MS-DOS in Windows 95?

Yuhong Bao — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 09:44:10 GMT

Unfortuately however, even if Win32 existed since NT 3.1, Windows 95 encouraged a lot of Win32 apps that did not handle NT's security well, causing trouble when 9x was finally abandoned. Originally it was supposed to be after 98, but it was later pushed to after Me. BTW, be glad Nepture did not release, else 9x vs NT would be even more confusing.

The purpose of DOS under Windows 95 « Surviving Technology

The purpose of DOS under Windows 95 « Surviving Technology — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 03:57:38 GMT

PingBack from http://jamesnt.wordpress.com/2007/12/30/the-purpose-of-dos-under-windows-95/

re: What was the role of MS-DOS in Windows 95?

AlmostAlive — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 10:10:06 GMT

This was an awesome article -- throughly enjoyed it!

Most people complaining about Windows 95 have completely forgotten what things were like back then. If you had a CD-ROM, you were quite likely using an MS-DOS driver to access it. I still had plenty of DOS apps that required me to exit Windows to run (like games, demos, etc). And I ran Windows 95 in 4MB of RAM and it worked great. This was not a time for NT 3.51 to be in the hands of regular people!

re: What was the role of MS-DOS in Windows 95?

Sam — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 00:38:01 GMT

Igor: not to mention that if you run three-way SLI with 8800GTX Ultra, those 3GB quickly go down to 1.75GB

No. What's with the myth that graphics cards map their entire video RAM into the proccessor's address space?

They don't. They use an "apature" - a small(ish) "window" of RAM that is mapped to the part of graphics memory that the proccessor want's to use at that particular moment.

On systems that I've seen, this apature tends to be around 128MB, although it could be larger on high-performance systems.

re: What was the role of MS-DOS in Windows 95?

Yuhong Bao — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:58:19 GMT

"You can buy 8GB of DDR2-800 for as low as $175 and 32-bit Vista can't use more than 3GB, not to mention that if you run three-way SLI with 8800GTX Ultra, those 3GB quickly go down to 1.75GB"

Until you enable PAE, then the physical address space is expanded to 36-bit.

BTW, in case you are confused about the interaction between PAE and NX:

http://yuhong386.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!57E2793D0C53276F!147.entry

re: What was the role of MS-DOS in Windows 95?

Triangle — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 07:16:38 GMT

Thursday, December 27, 2007 3:20 PM by cmov

" ... it's getting annoying to hear people cry that they've installed another GiB or 2 of RAM and things aren't any faster. They should've known better."

Obviously you've never met an average Windows user.

"To be a bit more ontopic here: A typical DOS program could run well within low memory (which was like, the famous and misquoted(?) 640kB). Ofcourse a minimal Windows program needs at least 2MiB but more realistically 5MiB, still programs should be designed to use no more memory then neccesary for its purpose."

That is true. However: You're average DOS program doesn't have translucent window borders, and a very long time ago Windows gave up on being compact. The cost of RAM has dropped, so Microsoft simply doesn't seriously optimize memory usage anymore.