Gregory's Server@dosnostalgic let's be fair: Windows wasn't letting you "boot into the legacy OS", it was just letting you quit out of the shell, because at the time, it was literally just a fancy GUI shell for DOS, and remained so (for home users, enterprise users got NT in the early 90s) until Windows XP
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 @vinesnfluff Here's Raymond Chen, the guy who was essentially responsible for DOS in Windows, on how that actually worked:  @dosnostalgic @vinesnfluff More like Raymond CHAD for me, this guy is awesome even though I hate Windows and M$ @speaktrap @dosnostalgic Microshaft has done *good work* for Tech. DirectX as a whole, bringing Multitasking and GUIs to mainstream PCs, the fact that they gave IBM the slip allowing for the entire "PC Compatible" ecosystem, which made computers cheaper over time. They were never incompetent... They were always evil. "Lawful Evil" to use DnD words :P @vinesnfluff @dosnostalgic @dosnostalgic@mastodon.social @vinesnfluff@equestria.social Ah, Raymond Chen. He had the best blog on his brother emailing actual heads of state to complain about family members and petty grievances. In addition to Raymond’s professional accomplishments, he was a fantastic storyteller as well. @dosnostalgic @vinesnfluff when the black screen told you in orange letters that it was safe to shut the computer off, you literally had a shell, you just had to run the commands to clear the screen. Not saying win95 was just a fancy gui for dos, nor do I remember how functional that shell was given that I was in primary school when I messed around with it, but it was at the very least somewhat functional. @kly @dosnostalgic aaaand now you got me wanting to set up win9x on 86box just to try that  @dosnostalgic @vinesnfluff @kly It's been years, but IIRC, if you boot to MS-DOS mode, run @dosnostalgic @kly Well paint me purple and call me "Twilight", it actually works. The process goes: @dosnostalgic @kly PS this was a clean install. Or, cleanish. I did install the drivers needed to get sound/graphics properly out of 86box, cuz if I was setting this up, I might as well have it ready to screw around with some gaems. @dosnostalgic @kly Bonus: If you type 'win' instead of 'cls' it goes back to windows. @kly @vinesnfluff That only happened when you had a shitty DOS driver sitting in memory refusing to shut down. That command prompt was still very much Windows. If you didn't, there's nothing you could do on that screen besides shut your machine off. |
@vinesnfluff No. Windows 9x was not "just a fancy GUI shell for DOS". In fact it was sort of the other way around. It was a full on standalone OS that had legacy DOS support fully integrated in its kernel. But if you wanted an actual MS-DOS you had to reboot. There was nothing to quit to, as DOS 7 that was used as a bootloader was completely gone by the time Win9x was running.