OT: Computer Problems

Also Win 3.1 and DOS were separate products. It was not til Win 95 they attempted to convince you otherwise.

I was running some version of Linux on a 386 as a firewall/router to share the dial-up with my lodger.

I remember wondering at the time why MS included Win versions of the programs (also undelete) with DOS. Perhaps in the nature of the deal with Central Point. DOS was still dominant when Win 3.1 came out.

Yes XP had a firewall but it was turned off by default. SP2 changed the setting to 'on by default'.

- Regards wasbit

The dreaded catch 22 situation. No antivirus so the computer got infected as soon as an internet connection was made but the internet connection was needed to get the antivirus. The only free way round it, that I found, was to allow the infection & clean it up after an antivirus was installed.

DOS was the operating system under which the *application* Win3.1 ran.

Win3.1 was not an operating system, it was a desktop environment, much as Gnome and KDE are today on Linux.

Windows was not a stand-alone OS until NT. 1 to 3.11, then 95, 98, and Millennium[1] were platforms that still sat on top of DOS even if DOS was somewhat hidden from view from 95 on.

WinXP was the first to make a resonable job of merging the NT and DOS based heritage into one platform.

I know. Windows was efectively a GUI "program manager" application then, although Quarter Deck's Deskview may have been better at managing memory and multi-tasking (I never used it) for DOS executables. I certainly had no need for Windows when my work was based around mature DOS programs.

Yes. I hardly used Win 3.1 and went from DOS to Win2k (NT 5), skipping the Win 9x/Me line.

I'm not so sure XP (NT 5.1) was much better than NT4/5 (they had no underlying DOS but could emulate it somewhat) for running DOS programs (maybe you don't mean that). This was why I kept DOS and made the system dual-boot when I installed Win2k.

Yup, I remember in the early to mid nineties using windows 3.11 as a way of task switching DOS apps mostly. ISTR the company had windows versions of their main apps as well as the DOS ones. Many opted for the windows versions since they were "pretty", but the graphics speed of the day (Trident 9000 series video cards) was pretty poor, so things like scrolling text was very slow. So WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS could blaze through work compared to 5.2 for windows!

Although it was 32 bit code, it could run 16 bit Windows and DOS code. So XP would run DOS stuff reasonably well.

XP64 never really caught one and lacked driver support.

At least some versions were DOS Extenders, i.e. the implemented a 32 bit, virtual memory, environment, on top of the 16 bit 640k MS-DOS, but called back into MS-DOS for I/O etc.

In 1988 I was using a powerful desktop computer (Compaq Deskpro 386/33 with maths coprocessor) for the first computerised drug application submitted in the UK. It used MS-DOS 3.31 and DESQview (and, I think, QEMM); hardware included a 12" laserdisk. I can remember 6 different applications available for view on the screen. DESQview worked well, and I was very impressed with it.

The slowness of Win programs was a real problem then. Early Win versions of some good DOS products were also often half-baked and buggy (to be expected, I suppose).

As long as it was "conventional" code which stuck to the documented DOS (and some BIOS) interrupts. Programs that had their own drivers or talked to hardware directly couldn't run. We used a CAD program that had its own graphics, mouse/trackpad and serial port drivers. It had to run on real DOS and was blazingly fast.

That driver support is the key.

I used QEMM on my 486. It was very good at tucking things away in upper memory.

I had a feeling I'd misspelled it! My boss used it and I remember him saying the same.

That was true up to win 3 mostly. 3.1 ran on the 386 (and later) processors in protected mode, and so could virtualise access to hardware resources. The program may have thought it was banging the hardware directly, but the linear address space to physical mapping allowed by the CPU could allow such apps to play nice together.

WP51 was a good example - it came with a number of video drivers for common cards, and video card makers would quite often ship their own drivers for popular apps to support extra capabilities. (Tseng lab cards with drives to support enhanced text modes such as the 100 col wide one were very nice)

There is quite a nice overview of the architecture here:

Yup there were certainly exceptions but a fair amount of DOS stuff would run (and much of it by that time played pretty free and loose with the hardware!)

My understanding is that the Win 3.1/9x line of OS were fine for running pretty much all DOS programs because they did a better job of virtualisation. The NTVDM which did the job on NT was not a complete implementation and also disallowed certain low-level operations.

I still have WP51 and it runs fine under NTVDM. I would expect that because it's text-mode and is a "well behaved" application.

Chen is always a good source. I'd forgotten about Win32s. This also shows that the pre-NT Wins were more than just another application or window manager on top of DOS.

That freedom to play with the hardware was used in the "demo" scene where programs producing amazing video effects by programming the graphics card directly were created using a minimum amount of code. I can't see them working on NT systems.

NT was never intended to be a fully compatible DOS platform, and did not contain a full copy of DOS lurking under the hood.

Well it allowed you to load custom drivers for displays - and those accessed the hardware without using any OS or BIOS capabilities (which TBH were fairly feeble even for the standard built in hardware!)

Yup that .1 on the end of win 3 that heralded a sophisticated upgrade in technology - and actually quite impressive for the time.

At my first job after uni in the late 80's I was given the task of implementing a load of built in test software of a new 386 based embedded system. All protected mode. I recall it only took a couple of days to get comfortable with the changes from 16 bit to 32 bit x86 assembler, but then the next six months to get a reasonable grasp of the

You could do it in in Kernel mode code, or you write a simple device driver that basically creates GDT / or LDT segments that map some address space directly onto the hardware registers of interest. Then you can write user mode code that can bit bang as much as you want.

The good thing about WP5.1 was that you could solve crosswords with it by entering the letters of a word and putting ?'s for the letters you don't know - it would come up with a list of suitable words. Cracked many DT crosswords that way!

After many years of using WordPerfect, it initially felt like quite a backward step to move to Word. The inability to see the formatting codes felt a bit like when reel-to-reel tapes were replaced by cassettes - it worked, but you didn't feel in control in quite the same way.

I was used to a nice big cursor rectangle, and it was some time before I adjusted to a thin line. Even now I get Windows to put colourful blobs at each end.

I do recall having to support some of the clerical staff in the more tricky layout stuff - tables and equations could be quite trying.

Somebody wanted a banner with one letter per A4 page, but this was far outside the font settings... unless you made it an equation. ;-)

Chris

Yes, I still miss Reveal Codes and F4 for Hanging Indent