Windows NT: Peeking into the Cradle

Re:Windows NT: Peeking into the Cradle by mschaef on Tuesday November 28, 2023 @02:35PM (#38450150)

> I still remember sitting on my bed totally transfixed during the install when I moved from 95 to 98.

For me, the key Windows 95 moment happened while I was sitting in an IBM lab working as a tester for OS/2 Lan Server. We had a copy of Windows 95 we were testing for compatibility.

Playing around one afternoon, we decided to try to break it. We started Drivespace compression, let it run for a while, and pulled the plug on the machine. Plugged it back in and it picked up right where it had left off...

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Re:Windows NT: Peeking into the Cradle by Unfrozen0688 on Tuesday November 28, 2023 @03:17PM (#38450681)

And Windows 95 is DOS too, not NT. So less stable than NT

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Re:Windows NT: Peeking into the Cradle by mschaef on Tuesday November 28, 2023 @03:27PM (#38450814)

Agreed, although the relationship of DOS and Windows 95 is significantly stranger than that wording implies. DOS boots Windows 95, and legacy I/O can go through DOS, but DOS is also hosted by V86 machines to run DOS apps.

I'm pretty sure it's possible for a DOS process running in a window to issue a file system request (a DOS API call) that gets trapped and processed by 32-bit VMM code and then immediately forwarded back to (a different instance of) DOS for handling by a legacy device driver.

There are reasons for this.

It's amazing it worked.

I'm thankful it's gone.

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Re:Windows NT: Peeking into the Cradle by HeckFeck on Tuesday November 28, 2023 @03:43PM (#38451023)

Not quite. DOS was just the bootloader for Windows 9x.

While Windows 95's kernel didn't have the full feature set of NT, it still was more sophisticated than DOS.

Source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=24063

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