Remember Windows 1.0? It's been 30 YEARS (and you're officially old - A Nostalgic Retrospective)

The Register ^ | Nov 20, 2015 | Shaun Nichols

[trebb]

My first experience was with Win 2.0 - even it was very “DOS-ey”

[norwaypinesavage]

Clippie??? His name was Bob.

[RightGeek]

No, Bob was another joke.

[HughHefner]

No foolin’! And had a cassette tape for storage!

[Disambiguator]

The early Windows versions weren’t really operating systems, as they required MS-DOS to be installed on the PC already. Windows was just a GUI, but it was still DOS under the hood.

Windows 95 was the first real Windows operating system.
Hard to believe it’s been 20 years since it came out!

[dayglored]

> Anyone remember having to set jumpers on the NIC card? :-)

Oh yeah. And Windows NT4 -- the first server OS -- under some circumstances, if you had to change the IP address of the server you had to find, jumper, and install a whole separate network card.

[dayglored]

> 6809

My favorite processor of all time. Wrote tons of code for that CPU.

After I got a real assembler, I got a copy of Hendrick's Small-C Compiler and wrote a replacement back-end code generator for the 6809 instruction set, bootstrapped it so that the compiler ran native on the 6809, grafted a floating point package onto it, and used it to write the application software for a DSP-based spacecraft attitude control system. If Motorola had manufactured the 6809 with radiation-hard silicon, that code would have flown; as it was it was relegated to ground-based prototypes and test systems. But it worked great.

Fun times, before the IBM-PC and the 8086 ate everybody's lunch. :-)

[dayglored]

> Windows was just a GUI, but it was still DOS under the hood. Windows 95 was the first real Windows operating system.

Actually, no, Win95 and 98 still required DOS underneath, although once they were running they largely ignored it. Try starting a Win95 system without IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, CONFIG.SYS, and AUTOEXEC.BAT and you'll see what I mean.

The "NT" branch of Windows (which gave us NT4, Win2000, XP, and the rest) was the first true Windows OS family that was independent of MS-DOS.

[Disambiguator]

I'm surprised Windows NT didn't make the "Good" list. It was a pretty solid and long-lived OS in its day.

Windows 2000 and XP (and beyond, I think) still use the same OS kernel. NT is (or was) still around, it's just not called that any more.

[Disambiguator]

Actually, no, Win95 and 98 still required DOS underneath, although once they were running they largely ignored it. Try starting a Win95 system without IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, CONFIG.SYS, and AUTOEXEC.BAT and you'll see what I mean.

Those were system files that were installed during W95 setup, so they were basically integrated into the OS. The older versions of Windows had to be installed separately from the DOS install.

[Dr.Deth]

To this day I can't see "A9" anywhere without thinking "LDA #" (load accumulator immediate).

^H^H^H^H^H^HEAEAEA

[dayglored]

>> Actually, no, Win95 and 98 still required DOS underneath, although once they were running they largely ignored it. Try starting a Win95 system without IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, CONFIG.SYS, and AUTOEXEC.BAT and you'll see what I mean.

> Those were system files that were installed during W95 setup, so they were basically integrated into the OS. The older versions of Windows had to be installed separately from the DOS install.

I think we're talking about two different (though related) things.

You're correct that the Windows installer for 95 and 98 placed the MSDOS system files IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS in the root. But that wasn't what I was referring to. I was speaking of the fact that Win95 and Win98 required MSDOS -- they couldn't start and run without it.

In both Win95 and Win98, the system actually booted first into an instance of MSDOS. Within the MSDOS system there was a command "WIN" that started Windows on top of MSDOS. The "WIN" was originally the last line of AUTOEXEC.BAT, but Microsoft later made it implicit rather than explicit, so that it appeared to the user that they had booted directly into Windows. But in fact if you suppressed the "WIN" command, you would be left running a fully-functional copy of MSDOS. You could type the "WIN" command manually from MSDOS and Windows would start. And you could exit from Windows and still be running the boot instance of MSDOS underneath.

The point I was making was that Win95 and Win98 could not start and run without MSDOS, even though they largely ignored it once they were launched with the MSDOS "WIN" command. If you don't believe me, start a copy of Win98, and launch the MS-DOS prompt to get a command line window. Type the command:

C:\> WIN /?

and hit Enter. You'll see the help for the WIN command, which reads like this (alert: Blast From The Past):

C:\>WIN /?

Starts Windows.

WIN [/D:[F][M][S][V][X]]

/D    Used for troubleshooting when Windows does not start correctly.
  :F  Turns off 32-bit disk access.
      Equivalent to SYSTEM.INI file setting: 32BitDiskAccess=FALSE.
  :M  Enables Safe mode.
      This is automatically enabled during Safe start (function key F5).
  :N  Enables Safe mode with networking.
      This is automatically enabled during Safe start (function key F6).
  :S  Specifies that Windows should not use ROM address space between
      F000:0000 and 1 MB for a break point.
      Equivalent to SYSTEM.INI file setting: SystemROMBreakPoint=FALSE.
  :V  Specifies that the ROM routine will handle interrupts from the hard
      disk controller.
      Equivalent to SYSTEM.INI file setting: VirtualHDIRQ=FALSE.
  :X  Excludes all of the adapter area from the range of memory that Windows
      scans to find unused space.
      Equivalent to SYSTEM.INI file setting: EMMExclude=A000-FFFF.

Incidentally, I got the above text by copy/pasting it from my running Win98SE VMware VM that's in another window while I FReep. :-) Otherwise I never would have remembered it all!

Anyway, I'll grant the point that Win95 and Win98 were -- once lauched -- largely independent of the MSDOS that had launched them, and they pretty much operated as stand-alone operating systems. But they could never get themselves going without that MSDOS startup. Everything in the MSDOS startup files CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT mattered to Windows.

Here are the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files from my Win98SE VM. Remember HIMEM.SYS?:

C:\>type config.sys
device=C:\WINDOWS\himem.sys
device=c:\dos\oakcdrom.sys /d:cdr00001

C:\>type autoexec.bat
rem - By Windows Setup - C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\mscdex.exe /d:cdr00001
C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\doskey /insert

Those lines about "cdr00001" are what make the CDROM drive appear in Windows.

A good time had by all.

[dayglored]

>> To this day I can't see "A9" anywhere without thinking "LDA #" (load accumulator immediate).

> ^H^H^H^H^H^HEAEAEA

LOL! NOP me will ya? Well we'll just see about that... :-)

[dayglored]

Man I got carried away there! Sorry for the lengthy screed. I was having too much fun playing with Win98... oops!

[Disambiguator]

Ok, I get it. :^)

[terycarl]

I admit I finally retired my last Win95 install a couple years ago, and now the oldest version I run is Win98SE. But if 95 does what you need, keep it flyin' and more power to ya. What kind of hardware is it on, or is it in a VM now?

The 'Puter is an IBM Aptiva, 5 hard drives, 48,128 KB total, 2,078 kb video, 640kb base......

I was told that bthis would be more capacity than I'd ever need....would last me a life time.... I now use it for my address list (has Lotus) and I play free cell on it!!!