Reply 100 of 140, by digger
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jesolo wrote on 2016-04-11, 08:53:Microsoft already wanted to move on from DOS back in 1987, when OS/2 was supposed to be the "follow up" of DOS. They even ran a […]
Microsoft already wanted to move on from DOS back in 1987, when OS/2 was supposed to be the "follow up" of DOS. They even ran advertising campaigns stating that "DOS is dead".
With DOS, Microsoft had competitors in the market (most notably DR-DOS) which potentially hurt their sales.
That is why Microsoft eventually released MS-DOS 5.0 & 6.0 (up to 6.22), even though the original intention was to stop at version 4.0.However, I think with the release of Windows 95 & then Windows 98, Microsoft was finally able to steer developers towards writing software & games for the Windows platform, but many users (mostly businesses) still stuck to their old DOS based software (since it was very costly for small to medium businesses to upgrade their entire software & hardware base to run on Windows in just one go).
I my experience, it was almost purely the games that kept DOS alive past 1990 or so. By the early '90s, all the serious productivity stuff had already moved on to Windows 3.x. It makes sense, since productivity software depends on proper APIs, UI toolkits and abstraction libraries, whereas games needed to remain as close to the metal as possible, in order to squeeze the best performance out of PC hardware. It wasn't until the advent of DirectX that Windows95 became considered at least "on par" with DOS as a PC game platform. Serious top-tier games didn't start to appear for Windows95 until 1996, and even then, DOS continued to be a prime game OS even throughout 1997, with quite a few games being released on CD-ROM with executables both for Protected Mode DOS and Windows.
I kind of lament the point in time when Windows9x/DirectX took over, since right up until then, there had been no effective decades-long PC gaming OS monopoly. In the early DOS era, many PC games were so-called "booters", which didn't even require an OS and gave early PC gamers an almost console-like experience of simply inserting the floppy disk containing the game and switching on or rebooting their computer. Later in the DOS era, PC games ran on DR-DOS just as well as they did on MS-DOS. But once Windows became a necessity for playing modern PC games, there would be no alternative for PC gamers for many years. It wasn't until the Wine project, and later Valve with their Proton project, made Linux an increasingly practical alternative. But it hasn't reached the level of a near-native gaming experience with most modern PC games until fairly recently. But thanks to Valve and especially the hype around Steam Deck, the future of OS-independent quality PC gaming looks bright. 🙂
(Sorry for yet another tangent, by the way. 😅)