Timeline for What key factor led to the sudden commercial success of MS Windows with v3.0?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 24 at 18:33 | comment | added | Coder | @john_e That might be true. But it's not DOS, that does this job in the background after Windows is loaded. It's windows. This might interest you: youtube.com/watch?v=-vJQv4rgHYE&t=4935s | |
| Mar 24 at 18:29 | comment | added | john_e | @Coder Win16 doesn't have a file access API, so 16-bit Windows programs have to use the DOS-style INT21h API. And to do that from protected mode they need the DOS extender | |
| Mar 24 at 17:27 | comment | added | Coder | @john_e The DOS extender wasn't important for Windows 3.x applications. They didn't need it. Windows 3.0 already run in protected mode on a 286/386 machine, thus they had access to all the RAM. The DOS extender was only important for DOS applications that are using a DPMI DOS extender itself and thus were Protected Mode programs. The PM was requires to brake the 640 KiB memory barrier for code and data. The EMS solution was only usable for data, but not for code. | |
| Mar 3, 2017 at 15:33 | comment | added | mschaef | Windows/286 was real mode with the A20 gate disabled. This gave access to a paragraph less than 1088K, through the use of the HMA. Windows/386 had a protected mode VMM sitting underneath a real mode Windows kernel. You can think of it was DesqView/386, but with Windows as the GUI.. the main benefit was background processing of DOS apps. | |
| Mar 3, 2017 at 11:12 | comment | added | Stephen Kitt | Ah yes, you're right, the kernel ran in protected mode but applications still ran in real mode. | |
| Mar 3, 2017 at 11:05 | comment | added | john_e | As I understand it, the 286/386 versions of Windows 2.x could run in protected mode, but programs were still limited to 640k. That's how it's described at virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/2011/06/01/windows-3-0 for example. | |
| Mar 3, 2017 at 10:33 | comment | added | Stephen Kitt | This was already true of Windows 2.1 (which could even use EMS on 8086 computers). | |
| Mar 3, 2017 at 10:21 | history | answered | john_e | CC BY-SA 3.0 |