News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The History of Windows 95. Parent comment

Re:The History of Windows 95 by AshamedCaptain on Monday September 04, 2023 @11:12AM (#37381246)
Why? 3.x in 386 enhanced mode was practically the same design (well, maybe no ConfigMG) and people there would have no problem saying it was "DOS based".
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The History of Windows 95 by BirAdam on Monday September 04, 2023 @12:20PM (#37381936)
Win9x didn't use MS-DOS for filesystem access, while all versions of Win3 except for 3.11 for Workgroups did use MS-DOS for filesystem access. As a result, when you booted up Win95, MS-DOS didn't matter at all except as the second stage boot loader.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The History of Windows 95 by AshamedCaptain on Monday September 04, 2023 @12:52PM (#37382258)
As you yourself are saying, 3.11 did exactly the same. So one must find another criteria.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The History of Windows 95 by bonzini on Monday September 04, 2023 @03:04PM (#37383789)
It's more complicated than that, Windows 95 would also check for programs intercepting INT 21h, sandwich its filesystem access routines in between and possibly call the old interrupt handler even when running from 32-bit programs.

It's more optimized and more polished but it's still Win386 at its heart, and it actually makes sense a lot. The book "Unauthorized Windows 95" talks in detail about how it works.

[ Parent | on HN ]