Mostrecent version of ms dos1/8/2024 All Windows versions prior to those with the "NT kernel" were more like a GUI on top of DOS. Undocumented Windows: A Programmers Guide to Reserved Microsoft Windows Api Functions. Andrew Schulman, David Maxey, Matt Pietrek (1992).Windows internals: the implementation of the Windows operating environment. A book list for operating system kernel developers and device driver writers. Ironically, given that Windows NT 3.1 was released in 1993, the Windows NT lineage actually is the not-based-upon-DOS Windows-is-the-operating-system system that all of the people in the middle 1990s were trying to convince the world that DOS+Windows 95 was.Īnd, eighteen years later, we're still trying to get it through to some people that Windows NT doesn't work like DOS and never has. And in fact for many TUI programs that one can run on Windows NT, including all of the tools in Microsoft's various Resource Kits, there is still no whiff of DOS anywhere in the picture, because these are all ordinary Win32 programs that perform Win32 console I/O, too. There's just a Win32 program talking to its Win32 console object. If one has a command prompt window open on Windows NT then one is almost always running CMD, which is Microsoft's default command interpreter supplied in the box and which is an ordinary, textual user interface, Win32 program. DOS is a family of operating systems: MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS, FreeDOS, OpenDOS, et cetera. Aside from the fact that it is command interpreters that prompt, not operating systems, this conflates "DOS" with "textual user interface" and "command interpreter", neither of which are in actuality synonymous with DOS. What also doesn't help is when people mistakenly talk of a "DOS prompt" in Windows NT, as has even happened in answers here. This is the Windows NT 6.x bootstrap process. It is not layered on top of DOS, works in a completely different way to DOS, and can run DOS applications by dint of an NT Virtual DOS Machine (NTVDM) which is a virtual machine that runs on top of Windows NT rather than the other way around. The Windows NT lineage comprises Windows NT 3.x, Windows NT 4.0, Windows NT 5.0 ("Windows 2000"), Windows NT 5.1 ("Windows XP"), Windows NT 5.2 (some editions of Windows XP and "Windows Server 2003"), Windows NT 6.0 ("Windows Vista"), and Windows NT 6.1 ("Windows 7").This is the DOS+Windows bootstrap process. Entire books have been written on the subject of this layering, and it is the subject of some contention, not least because a lot of people for a fair while in the early to middle 1990s wanted the world to believe that DOS was gone and Windows was the operating system. The DOS+Windows lineage comprises DOS+Windows all versions up to version 3.11, DOS+Windows 95, DOS+Windows 98, and DOS+Windows Millennium Edition.There are two distinct lineages when it comes to Microsoft Windows, and it doesn't help things when people write things about one lineage that they have learned about the other.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |