Reply 20 of 23, by dr_st
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wrote:Windows will never be pure DOS. It's Windows, capable of doing some later type of DOS. Not pure DOS at all. For pure dos, you ne […]
Windows will never be pure DOS. It's Windows, capable of doing some later type of DOS. Not pure DOS at all.
For pure dos, you need eighter: MS-Dos, Novell-DOS, IBM-DOS, DR-DOS or Free-DOS.Those are the real deal, not Windows95/98/ME.
Yes it can be used to launch DOS software. Still, not pure DOS.
I am sorry, but this is plain wrong.
Windows 95 and 98 run on top of pure DOS (which is unofficially called DOS 7.0 and DOS 7.1). These DOS versions have some changes compared to DOS 6, but so does DOS 6 compared to DOS 5, or PC-DOS / DR-DOS compared to MS-DOS. Does not make them any less "pure".
The key point here is that when the system boots, it boots pure DOS, loads DOS device drivers, DOS startup programs and DOS command interpreters (command.com or whatever you replace it with). It supports all DOS device drivers and applications. At no point during the startup are any Windows modules present, until WIN.COM is launched. This is done automatically if BootGUI=1 in MSDOS.SYS (default), but with BootGUI=0 you have to do it manually, just like with Windows 3.x. Essentially, Windows 9x startup process is remarkably similar to someone just putting WIN.COM at the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT to launch Win 3.x on top of DOS 6.x.
Therefore with BootGUI=0 (and Logo=0 for the proper experience), you do get pure DOS.
The only thing I seem to recall, which can be claimed to be a divergence from pure DOS, is that Win9x DOS will always load HIMEM.SYS. I guess there exists somewhere some poorly written DOS software which will have a problem with that. 😉
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