Re:Ex-Caldera dev describes lost “WinBolt” Win9x-capable ver...
by hulitu on Tuesday August 31, 2021 @01:44AM
(#28364345)
There were a lot of games which were DOS only or which required special HW for the windows version. So DOS was, more or less needed. Besides games were also engineering applications for example, who did not had yet a windows version (pspice, orcad) so people really needed DOS. It was later (win 98 era ) when the programs were "ported" to windows.
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Re:Ex-Caldera dev describes lost “WinBolt” Win9x-capable ver...
by nunobrito on Tuesday August 31, 2021 @05:12AM
(#28365551)
Performance was truly a major factor for that, even today.
Even if Windows 98 would be installed on the machine, running the software on plain MS-DOS would be drastically faster on those days when having less services/GUI on the background.
They would access the extended memory using the HIMEM.SYS driver and the run the software as bare-metal as possible. Not very different from what happens with linux servers nowadays.