"Zootal" wrote in message
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"Tom Del Rosso" wrote in message
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"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.


I'm not sure that is strictly true. All of those versions were fine, if they
were just left alone. You have to remember that in those early days of
'home' computing, people weren't as savvy as they are now, and their home
computer was used for little else than word processing and perhaps some
e-mail activity. That is the only expectation that most had, and it's what
MS addressed with those early versions. It allowed simple folk whose only
concept of a computer was something they had seen in the movies, to
interface with what was, after all, a complex item. It simply wasn't
designed to be 'tinkered' with by average users who wanted to start changing
hardware in their machines all the time, or adding software.

Even given those limitations, I still think that most 'proper' applications
that were actually written for those platforms, ran pretty well, and trouble
free for the most part. Over the years, I have run many third party
applications and my son has run every game known to man, largely without
incident, on every version of Windows that there has been (excluding Vista,
so far ... !! )

For sure, XP seems to be the most versatile version that there has been, but
then I think that migrated down from the pro end, and was adapted for the
home market, wasn't it ? There was a need for an OS that could tolerate the
foibles of the 'modern' user, and XP was it.

It must be a terribly difficult balancing act for them to continually
produce and maintain and OS that has the performance and facilities of a jet
airliner, yet 'drives' like a Ford Escort.

Arfa