> Yes, it was. I evaluated OS/2 1.0 professionally, when it was new; did you? I was 12, so just a user and programmer. (Dating back to Windows 2.11) > 1. Wind

> Yes, it was. I evaluated OS/2 1.0 professionally, when it was new; did you? I was 12, so just a user and programmer. (Dating back to Windows 2.11) > 1. Windows 2 had an edition built around 286 protected mode. ... In fact, Windows/286 actually delivered one main benefit: you got an extra 64 kB of RAM. Windows/286 didn't use protected mode, all it let you do is run in real mode with A20 unmasked. (Which is where the extra almost-64K came from). Probably did terrible things for the marketing of 80286-specific software for a while. Windows/386 did use protected mode to run multiple DOS apps, but the Windows subsystem ran just like any other DOS app - in real mode. It was Windows 3.0 that migrated the Windows subsystem over to protected - mostly with existing apps. You run Excel on Windows/386, you have 640K + whatever EMS you might have. You run Excel on Windows 3.0 (even on a 286) and you have direct access (albeit segmented) to the full installed RAM. You're right, though, that none of this helped DOS apps. > Windows 2 was able to multitask dos applications, in software, but the problem with doing it that way is that they all had to fit into 640 kB of RAM. I've done this with DesqView on an 8088 also. It worked well enough to run a couple BASIC interpreters, although it wouldn't have been useful at all for anything real. It was interesting to play around with the total lack of memory protection. The two BASICs (with the same DEF SEG) could easily be able to share data with peeks and pokes to the same memory location.