flipper wrote:

On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 09:52:54 -0000, "Arfa Daily"
wrote:


"Zootal" wrote in message
...

"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.


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,

Mainly because things generally improve over time,

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.

As is usually the case, it's not that simple and Windows NT, the
'family' XP is a sibling of, predates Windows 95.

People act as if Microsoft always 'ran everything' but they started
off as a hole in the wall group writing software for other people,
like IBM (DOS. OS/2, etc) and Apple (Word, Office, etc) They also had
the foresight to retain rights to what they wrote.


Microsoft started under a different business name, building
electronic vehicle counters that were used to audit the traffic on a
road. Then they wrote one of the first BASIC interpeters for the early
kit computers under their new Microsoft name.



Their first big break was keeping rights to DOS on non IBM machines,
of which there weren't any... for about 15 minutes till the clones
came out. Oops (for IBM). Actually, IBM didn't really care all that
much about DOS, and OS/2 for that matter, as they considered it more
of a necessary evil to sell hardware than a money maker in it's own
right. It was the clones they hated.

But, back to the 'Windows' O.S., they were for different purposes. As
I mentioned, MS retained rights to Office on 'non apple' products and
I suppose Apple figured why not? since that's all it would run on.
'Windows' (for DOS) was originally developed so that Office could run
on x86 computers. Oops (for Apple).

But, back at the IBM barn, MS was working on OS/2 when Windows 3.0
turned out to be an actual 'hit' (meaning they finally had a version
that worked) so MS wanted to incorporate more of the Windows API into
what was then called "NT OS/2" but IBM had different ideas so they
split and MS's work went on to be Windows NT. (IBM would later change
directions and advertise that OS/2 can run Windows apps too but why
not get 'the real thing'?)

DOS based Windows was to simply 'run programs' (and multimedia) while
NT was to be a multi-user, fully pre-emptive multitasking system
portable across multiple platforms while being both OS/2 and POSIX
complaint... as well as, of course, Windows (API). The holy grail in
those days was "transportability" and that's where HAL, the "Hardware
Abstraction Layer," comes from. It sits between the hardware and
everything else so you need only rewrite the rather small HAL and the
rest is none the wiser, or so the theory went. DOS Windows has no such
need because it's only job is to run on x86 machines.

In some ways DOS Windows was functionally 'ahead' of NT in that it
(GUI) was first out of the chute and got the consumer oriented
'multimedia' stuff. NT first got the Windows 3.x GUI and then, after
Windows 95, that GUI migrated to NT but, for a while, people had a
kind of "Back to the Future" experience going from their nifty looking
Windows 95 home computer to the office 'super duper OS' NT system with
the 'old fashioned' Windows 3.x GUI.

NT was the 'business' OS, where multi-user and multitasking was
needed, and didn't get the full multimedia treatment till XP.

This, of course, isn't everything but it hit on a few of the major
points.

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



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