5 ms·
This is common misconception, but in fact since Windows 3.x there was a kernel that did a lot of stuff but made it look like DOS was in control. This was in eff
by Maakuth 6y ago
This is common misconception, but in fact since Windows 3.x there was a kernel that did a lot of stuff but made it look like DOS was in control. This was in effect a virtual machine implementation, to make DOS apps behave correctly under multitasking while they were implemented as if owning the whole machine. To facilitate backwards compatibility with DOS drivers, Windows 95 emulated quite a bit of DOS kernel too, with some performance penalty. Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing blog has a number of postings to explain all this, this perhaps being the most informative: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24063 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24...
- cptskippy 6y ago> This is common misconception, but in fact since Windows 3.x there was a kernel that did a lot of stuff but made it look like DOS was in control. I don't think that's true of Win 3.x, only Win 9x. They are very different beasts.
- scarface74 6y agoThat’s Windows 95 not Windows 3.1. Windows 3.1 still used many of the Int21 Dos functions. Windows 95 could use the 16 bit DOS routines for backwards compatibility.
- Maakuth 6y agoI think it is sort of a continuum, with 95 being further on the path begun on Windows 3.x "386 Enhanced mode", or maybe it was like that in Windows/386 already (that was the branding for Windows 2.0). I have a feeling of reading a Raymond Chen blog post about how that worked, but my search skills fail me at this time. However, here's another site summarizing how that mode worked, allowing MS-DOS app multitasking among other things (32-bit disk I/O!): https://networkencyclopedia.com/windows-3-1/ https://networkencyclopedia.com/windows-3-1/