Old MS-DOS & WIN Software

[Allison]

>
>Subject: Re: Old MS-DOS & WIN Software
>   From: Madcrow Maxwell <madcrow.maxwell at gmail.com>
>   Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 08:24:11 -0500
>     To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
>
>Well, IMHO, Win95 was rather close to a real multitasking system, at
>least for Win32 programs. Maybe not as good as Linux or even NT, but
>it got the job done and got it done significantly better than 3.x

Yes, though not nearly as good as NT.  It reallys shows pain when 
there is networking activity and multiple tasks.

There were three multitasking (non unice) paths from DOS.  Win95, NT3.51
and OS/2 and NT is the only remaining technology line of the three that's
semidecent. 

>And before people go bashing 95 anymore, I want to go on record as
>saying it's one of the few M$ products I actually like. It runs well
>on even a 486 with only 8 MB of RAM (already an almost obsolete config
>by the time Win95 came out) and has one of the cleanest, nicest GUIs 
>around (bested at the time only by NeXT and OS/2 WPS)

As someone that maintained W95b in a business environment for 5years
and as a user it's ok.  W98se was better but more bloated.  If you built
the hybrid of 98 internals and 95gui it was decent.  However it's problems 
were that if it swaps things sometimes get nasty and FAT16/32 was not 
robust.  Also if an app went off in the woods the OS was doomed.   It 
certainly was serviceable and ran on fairly light platforms usefully.
After W98se the bloat was unmanageable.


Allison