"Tom Del Rosso" wrote in message
...

"flipper" wrote in message
news
On Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:02:25 +0000, Eeyore
wrote:

Well..... I never recall DOS crashing !

There's a good reason for that. DOS doesn't 'do' much of anything.

Oh, I remember it crashing and freezing, but it was always because of the
app, not the OS. With Windows the component that crashes most, on my PC,
is
the Explorer shell.

When I used OS/2 it was also the shell (Presentation Manager) that crashed
the most. Jerry Pournelle loved OS/2 but commented on how unstable PM
was.
It crashed a lot less than Windows of the time (either 95 or NT) but it
had
the unfortunate habit of overwriting the MBR with whatever file I was
trying
to save when it crashed.

Come to think of it, pre-95 Windows was very unreliable, but it was only a
DOS shell.

Windows 95/98/ME wasn't very reliable either. Vendors ported their buggy
apps to Windows, and they crashed there even more then they did under DOS.
Win2000 was an improvement, but was ill suited to environments where it was
exposed to a wide variety of hardware and software. Microsoft didn't really
make a stable and versatile OS until XP came out.