The author clearly doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. Win 3.1 didn’t kill DOS because it REQUIRED DOS.
NT and latter variants killed DOS, as did Linux and Mac OS.
Yes, you're right, but you're thinking like a techie (like me, too).
To most PC users, "Windows" and "DOS" were two different things because Windows was a GUI and DOS was a command line. Finer points like the fact that the GUI was nothing but an application layer over DOS didn't matter to users.
A software program that "ran on DOS" vs. one that "ran on Windows" underscored the difference.
> NT and latter variants killed DOS, as did Linux and Mac OS.
Yes, but... one could also say that NT didn't "kill" DOS, so much as it "replaced" DOS (and the DOS/Windows line).
What "killed" DOS and DOS-based Windows was Windows-ME. ME drove a stake through the heart of the DOS/Windows line. ME was intentionally broken, by Microsoft's design, to make the user experience so bad that people would rather take the leap to NT5 (Windows 2000) than continue under ME. Unstable, incompatible, hard to configure, and a poor shadow of 98/SE which was actually rather good for a single-user system.
People rejected ME in droves, and manufacturers had been pressured to drop support for 95/98 so all new computers came out with either ME, or the new Win-2000.
The emergence of Win-XP a year or two later sealed DOS/Windows' fate, as Microsoft withdrew support for the older releases.
I've run every version of Windows since and including Win2.0. Win3.11 was decent for its time; 98/SE was good; Win2K was good; XP eventually became decent; Win7 is great. 95, early XP, and Vista sucked. But WinME was by far the worst, and I have it on good authority from a friend working for Microsoft at the time, that ME's problems were intentional, and designed to kill off DOS/Windows. I have no reason to doubt that.