quote:
Originally posted by Refalm:
[QB]
Oh, I guess Windows 1, Windows 2 and Windows 3 never existed :confused:
it's not like you to slip up like this refalm!
windows 1, 2, 3 and 3.1x were all application level software packages which were compiled for use under MS-DOS (various versions), my copy of windows for workgroups 3.11 actually is packaged with ms-dos 6.22 (the final standalone msdos version), dos is the OS, which you install first, then you can run it etc, and install applications and utiities, such as ms-windows. windows contains a selection of software, notably it contains a memory manager, which enables ms-dos to use more than 640k of RAM (amazing! who would have thought we'd ever need that much memory! :rolleyes: ), a graphical user interface, and a filesystem manager, not to mention GUI versions of many utilities such as text editor etc. With the addition of the newer open source package "calmira II", windows 3.11 actually has a really good desktop environment/window manager, which is kind of like icewm and dfm running together. in fact this windows runs even better if you use the latest free version of DR-DOS instead of the included OS, further showing that the OS and applications level software are two separate animals. Oddly, DR-DOS setects installed windows software when you install it and installs extra stuff, so the best idea is to install msdos, then install windows, then rename the DOS dir to something (so you can plunder it for exe files later) and install DR-DOS in the same location MSDOS was in before. works great.
Having said that the only reason i used to use windows 3 was because i was experimenting to see how much of it i could replace with open source stuff, like the GNU ctuff compiled for DOS, and the FreeDOS stuff.
oh yes, and back to the subject, this concludes the case showing that microsoft windows is not an operating system (i would be willing to say that 95, 98 and ME are all further hacks on the apps-under-DOS concept) and that microsoft windows NT is microsoft's first non-DOS operating system. not counting Xenix, which was actually just a rebranded version of SCO UNIX.