Earlier quoted context omitted.
Half Life 3.11 confirmed.
Half Life for Workgroups
Copilot Life
Only one side will be the true successor to MS-DOS – Windows 2.x
51–60 of 78 posts
Re: Only one side will be the true successor to MS-DOS – Windows 2.x
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
He notably worked at Microsoft before founding Valve.
I believe he’s confirmed that his time at Microsoft both gave him the money and the desire to make Valve and Steam.
The desire to switch to games was, reputedly, seeing Doom outsell Windows 3.x with none of the marketing budget (with Windows having huge one).
Then not getting enough support in trying to drum up better support for gaming at Microsoft, IIRC
Re: Only one side will be the true successor to MS-DOS – Windows 2.x
#53But OS/2 was a better DOS than DOS, and a better Windows than Windows!
That was the slogan of OS/2 2.0. But by then where Windows 3.x was already out and in 386 Enhanced Mode, more than good enough. It also had the extra "escape hatch" of being able to quit to real DOS if a DOS box didn't work. OS/2 1.x's DOS box was bad, with lots of limitations, which isn't good when most existing PC apps are DOS apps. As for GUI, well, lets call the Presentation Manager 1.x v Windows 2.x a no-score d…
Has everyone forgotten how crashy Windows 3.x was, though? It was terrible.
Re: Only one side will be the true successor to MS-DOS – Windows 2.x
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends how you define sophisticated. Mac used the 68k so didn't have to jump through all those hoops mentioned above.
I’m distinguishing “sophistication” from “complexity”. Windows/386 is “sophisticated” in that it implements a much richer model of execution than its predecessors, with a supervising kernel and memory-protected virtual DOS machines. This is different from the complexity of programming with segmented memory, or punching through the various layers of backward compatibility that had built up even as early as the 286. Li…
I remember reading the PowerPC System Software volume of Inside Macintosh[1] at the time, and what I found impressive wasn't that 68k applications ran under emulation on PowerPC, but that much of the Toolbox and System Software were also still implemented in 68k code, implemented in terms of a general mechanism that could also be used by third-party code.
This came at a performance cost, of course, but I don't recall the Workgroup Server 6150 I was using at the time feeling significantly slower than my Quadra 605, though to be fair the 605 was at the very bottom end of the 040 Mac line. Then again, with the exception of a larger hard drive and bundled AppleShare software, the WGS 6150 was equivalent to the entry-level Power Mac 6100, as well.
[1] https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/PPC_System_Software_19...
Re: Only one side will be the true successor to MS-DOS – Windows 2.x
#55Re: Only one side will be the true successor to MS-DOS – Windows 2.x
#56> This is a major release of Windows and, similarly to the previous one [ep 10], it is not a complete operating system, but it’s simply a graphical user shell that is meant to be run on top of MS-DOS; thus, it inherently gains its limitations, albeit the developers had time to fix some things with this release, as well as add new features such as icons on the desktop and keyboard shortcuts. This is largely untrue. Wh…
The problem with all these arguments is that DOS extenders of the day used to do the same, or more. Do you call DOS extenders "operating systems not shells" too ?
On one hand you have that the technical answer to the above question is likely "yes". DOS is so simple that any non-trivial application likely qualifies as an operating system. Implementing some kind of virtual memory support is almost a given, and process control is not unheard of.
But on the other hand most people would refer to anything pre-95 as "shell" for the simple reason that it requires DOS to boot ; even when complexity-wise, 95 and later versions of 3.x are practically the same: if you call one an OS, you ought to call the other one a full OS too.
So this question is on the "angels on the head of a pin"-level; but this simply means there's no answer that doesn't require a lot of nuance, and this also applies to the "it can't be a shell, it does too many things" answer.
Re: Only one side will be the true successor to MS-DOS – Windows 2.x
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe he’s confirmed that his time at Microsoft both gave him the money and the desire to make Valve and Steam.
The desire to switch to games was, reputedly, seeing Doom outsell Windows 3.x with none of the marketing budget (with Windows having huge one). Then not getting enough support in trying to drum up better support for gaming at Microsoft, IIRC
Gabe and Carmack are probably above Amelio and below Jobs and Gates in impact on the world - but probably above them all in impact when measured on a “desired” axis - people sought out Doom in a way that even the iPhone wasn’t.
Re: Only one side will be the true successor to MS-DOS – Windows 2.x
#58Re: Only one side will be the true successor to MS-DOS – Windows 2.x
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was looking back to why I enjoyed computing so much more in the 80's and 90's compared to now, and of the many reasons, one of them was "No multitasking". Or even "little multitasking" because while Windows had multitasking, we didn't have the HW to do too many things at the same time. Right now we're on the crazy end of that spectrum. Every tab on your browser is potentially an application, and we multitask like c…
> enjoyed computing so much more in the 80's Also the days when you turned on a computer it was ready to rock within two seconds. A few friends were discussing video game load times throughout the years. Overall the elapsed times haven't changed much at all.
Turning my computer took a few minutes. It would do the RAM check (all 640K of it), at a fairly slow pace.
Re: Only one side will be the true successor to MS-DOS – Windows 2.x
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends how you define sophisticated. Mac used the 68k so didn't have to jump through all those hoops mentioned above.
I’m distinguishing “sophistication” from “complexity”. Windows/386 is “sophisticated” in that it implements a much richer model of execution than its predecessors, with a supervising kernel and memory-protected virtual DOS machines. This is different from the complexity of programming with segmented memory, or punching through the various layers of backward compatibility that had built up even as early as the 286. Li…
The way 386 enhanced mode worked was that there was a 32-bit preemptive multitasking kernel that would run 16-bit virtual machines. The first VM ran Windows in standard mode, and the rest were the DOS VMs. This meant that Windows programs still shared an address space and were cooperatively multitasked. This is actually somewhat similar to how Apple shoehorned multiprocessor support into later versions of Classic Mac OS. The OS runs under a microkernel. There's one main thread where all the cooperative multitasking happens (anything that uses the Toolbox must run in this thread), and then both user software and the system can make new threads that get preemptively multitasked with the main thread. The main difference is that I don't believe there's a way for Windows software to make use of the preemptive scheduler (unless maybe they do something hacky with a VxD driver, but that's kind of silly).