More specifically. The Win 3.x defininatly ran on DOS.
The Win9x series, including that price gouging excuse for an upgrade WinME, was a GUI on DOS and ran on DOS 7. The whole was a mis-match of 16/32 bit stuff and had horible memory management and it was generally best practise to reload the system from scratch at least once a year if you loaded sw (games) on a regular basis to avoid excessive system instabillities. The Windows NT line descends from VMS. The NT line has both COMMAND, a 16 bit emulator for backward compatibilty, and CMD, a 32 bit command line shell. After much hue and cry, the Windows 2000 actually extended the scripting abilities of the Win2K cmd shell quite a bit. However, they promote Visual Basic as the script language of choice for Win2K and though you can use cmd, perl, php, whatever, MS strongly encourages VB in docs so as to tie people to propriatery sw even further. Win2K, configured properly, will boot to a cmdcons (cmd Console) but this is really for emergency use and is generally only to get the system back up, which means you are tied to the GUI and all the resources that entails. The problem results in admins and users who do not know any scripting as you can do stuff with the GUI manually. Doing everything manually increases the workload, therefore some people buy third party tools to automate stuff at an even greater expense. End result is that most NT sys admins don't know scripting at all nor are they ever exposed to it unless they work in an Enterprise environment or do a lot of reading. With the upcoming MS licensing changes finally arriving, I suspect that this will be traced to the starting point that finally generates the necessary Linux installed infrastructure in small businesses that drives wide spread adoption and creates the larger experianced technician base necessary for support and across the board adoption of Linux in larger comapnies. -sp Richard Crawford wrote > > Thanks to all for your explanations! I think I grasp it now. > > The older versions of Windows really were just containers for DOS, a > fancy version of DOSSHELL. I believe it was version 3.0 of Windows when > Microsoft decided that users really didn't need to know anything but the > GUI; by Windows 2000, of course, DOS had been completely emasculated, > and Windows is now nothing but GUI. Which is a shame. I personally > really like just digging around inside the command line from time to > time and seeing what I can pull off. > > But, anyway... Thanks to everyone who helped me figure this out. I > appreciate it. :) _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
