Hello, On Sun, 29 Jan 2023 at 22:59, Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote:
> I think Microsoft would have had to find a way around the obvious > limitations in DOS, inherent in an operating system from 1981. With > more powerful CPUs, more memory, and networking, you need a more > powerful operating system. Let's call it "newDOS" and it is otherwise > a "DOS" operating system: command line in text mode. New programs use > a "newDOS" API, like any regular operating system. This "newDOS" also > needs to provide multitasking, and a better memory model (flat memory, > large address space, etc). "newDOS" also needs to provide a built-in > network stack, so you don't have to keep loading drivers and > configuring each application separately to talk to the network. > In my opinion, they actually did this. Pick Windows95, rename COMMAND.COM to KRNL386.EXE (i.e. Windows) to avoid the GUI load into VM0 and there you go a preemptive multitasking DOS with 32-bit device driver support and virtual memory. No networking but I suppose someone can write a VNETD.VXD device driver and you're done. The magic is made by VMM32.VXD (formerly WIN386.EXE, formerly DOS386.EXE), a highly evolved version of EMM386.EXE (hence the discussion in the other thread whether EMM386 is a VMM or not: it is, but it is still a very rudimentary one, as Tom pointed out). That's why in other threads I defend that VMM32/VXDs are an evolved version of DOS and not Windows (unlike NTOSKRNL, which is pure Windows), and that underneath the Windows 9X skin, MS-DOS (a 32-bit version of MS-DOS) is beating. Back to the supposed textmode version, if they had implemented the Ctrl+Alt+Fn way of switching sessions, as in some earlier Linux distributions, you could have had what you say, have Lotus 1-2-3 run in VM1, WordPerfect in VM2... (Ctrl+Alt+F1 or Ctrl+Alt+F2 to switch from one to the other). It is just that the popularity of GUIs made them prefer the Win32 API to any kind of DOS extension API. Even the concept of DLL can survive in such a 32-bit pure version of DOS without implying Windows. And if you are mainly designed to run Win32 applications, use NT kernel instead of DOS. Until Windows98 things seemed to go well: FAT32 support, LFN support, LBA support. Then WindowsME came to commit suicide and killed this 32-bit line of MS-DOS. Aitor
_______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
