REGISTRY CLEANER

[Bob Villa]

te:

Why would "command line" DOS need "registry cleaners"? Windows have a registry, all flavors.

[krw]

They never needed cleaning because THEY DIDN'T EXIST.

Obviously nothing learned.

[Oren]

Computers are like women. Miss a programming period and they go haywire on you.

[Oren]

Why use a disk editor when a file editor will work?

(The poster is talking about Microsoft DOS edlin command...)

[Oren]

Some IBM clones did not have a HDD to store these monster sized registries. Might be the poster is talking about a 15 page batch file.

[clare]

Getting the autoexec.bat and config.sys tuned right was something of an art back in the day.

[HeyBub]

Windows 1, 2, 3, 3.1, 95, 98 (and the variants) ran on top of an underlying DOS system.

[Robert Green]

Edlin? Real men used copy con and control-Z!

-- Bobby G.

[krw]

Clueless.

[krw]

Edlin *is* a disk editor.

[Oren]

Those were not registry files as we think of them today.

They were *.ini (any files a yanky called them)

Edited with a text editor.

[Oren]

Files=40

[Roy]

=3D=3D That is correct. There was a small registry in Windows 3.1 as I recall but nothing like the ones following 3.1.

[Roy]

=3D=3D You are correct...I was thinking in the broader context of "editing" aspects of the operating system. Users have been tinkering with their computers ever since they came into popular usage. =3D=3D

[Red Green]

Oren wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Remember Edlin? :-)

[Red Green]

Oren wrote in news:l4t3e6pkpnofjb0t15f5jdig1th2sd1ltb@

4ax.com:

remember edlin

[Roy]

[clare]

From:

Let us think back in history to the days of Windows 3.1. Initially, the systems were built with the assumption that only a handful of applications would be installed and that only a few dozens of system and application-wide settings would have to be stored. However, even in 1992, when Windows 3.1 was released, things were changing fast.

The average size of consumer-level hard drives was about 80 MB in

1992. In 1994, when Windows 95 was released, the average size of the hard drives had gone up to 400 MB, and it was not long before every computer sold had at least 1 GB of hard drive memory. While Windows 3.1 was initially targeted at corporate workstations, with each computer used only for one or two significant applications, Windows 95 was already targeted at consumers in the first place, with users expected not only to have a handful of significant applications installed, but also with users expected to be entrusted with performing maintenance on their own.

With the way Windows 3.1 applications stored their settings, this was a sure way towards chaos, as the Windows 3.1 installations deployed to consumers had shown. The original solution was to have each application and the operating system store its own settings in .ini files. However, the .ini model had a few problems.

Although they had several advantages i.e. .ini files were human-readable and almost impossible to become corrupted beyond repair, the operating system did not enforce any rules upon their storage. There was no way to tell where each application would store its settings, since there was no central storage place for them to be placed in. There was also no fair way to manage them, due to the fact that they were scattered all around the hard drive and, as a consequence, they were impossible to optimize.

Microsoft introduced the Windows Registry with Windows 95, but many in house tests had been run prior to this. Rumors that Microsoft was experimenting with a ?binary-only? settings storage solution were circulating even back in 1993, but it was only in 1994, with Windows

95, that this solution was promoted on the market.

In its first incarnation, the Windows Registry was stored in a fairly crude fashion compared to the form it has today. There were only four files though, since Windows was only single-user back then, it did not call for the much more complex incarnation of the registry that we know today.

Initially, the introduction of the registry was met with quite some acclaim, especially by the developers, who now had a unified solution for accessing system and application settings and information. Users and the minority of administrators who fashioned Microsoft Windows also praised the introduction of the registry, which put an end to the struggle with .ini files.

[clare]

He's right, as far as he went. But the registry started in Win95.

NT was the first "windows" that did not run on top of DOS.

See my last post

[clare]

No registry in 3.1 Beginnings of a registry in 3.11, but still called ini-files and scattered all over the system.