Does Windows still rely on MS-DOS? - Super User

http://superuser.com/questions/319056/does-windows-still-rely-on-ms-dos

by ivoflipse • 15 years ago

23 25 15 years ago

fuzzix3• 15 years ago

I could be pithy and answer "No", but in my maintenance of Windows in various contexts I rely on that shim of DOS emulation, Start -> Run -> cmd.

I feel like I get much of the quick info (e.g. ipconfig, net) I need here faster than I would get it from Control Panel -> Network (something) -> (forget the next bit).

Does Windows still rely on DOS? No. Do I? Sure.

grannyg00se• 15 years ago

But the answer is still no. You are not relying on DOS. You are relying on a command line interpreter that ships with Windows. It likely has nothing to do with DOS unless you are using a very old version of Windows.

fuzzix3• 15 years ago

Indeed. I first encountered DOS in the 3.2-ish days. I'm pretty sure the manual did not include 'net' or 'ipconfig'...

But the current Windows command line that has taken on the guise of DOS is useful to me.

drivebyacct2• 15 years ago

Try "command" in that field instead. I don't even know if it still ships with Windows 7, but my gut says yes.

fuzzix3• 15 years ago

Interesting that it still ship/s|ped/.

I am wondering why drive letters still exist. Was there a need for continuity across Windows platforms with different bases (3.1/NT/9x) or was the mania for backwards compatibility such that the model needed carrying forever?

Surely it is trivial enough to abstract \hd0 as C: for legacy applications.

This comes to mind because of the irritation of assigning a drive letter to a SMB map only to have it usurped by some multi-card reader USB thing which nabs drive letters up to H:

Surely a case for a class-based VFS - \hd, \usb, \opt(ical) ;)

edit I had momentarily forgotten about the 8.3 PROGRA~1/ mess. Please disregard any misguided attempt at an elegant "out" ;)

barrkel2• 15 years ago

64-bit Windows 7 has no 16-bit subsystem, so it cannot run command.com, nor any DOS application. Old games and the like need to rely on DosBox or Windows XP Mode or similar virtualization approaches.

thought_alarm2• 15 years ago

Well, when I upgraded to OS X Lion the installer failed because of a problem with the BOOT.INI file on my Windows partition. Imagine my surprise at seeing "BOOT.INI" in the Mac OS X installer logs. For a split second I thought that OS X was just a shell on top of MS-DOS.

bodhi• 15 years ago

"BOOT.INI" was actually introduced in Windows NT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLDR#boot.ini

I'm planning to upgrade this weekend, hope I don't have a similar issue!

thought_alarm2• 15 years ago

If you do, just clear the "read-only" and "system" flags from that file.

TwoBit• 15 years ago

Windows may no longer have DOS code in it, but it certainly has DOS characteristics and limitations in it. Most significantly: drive letters, backslash path separators, and 260 char file name limits. Also the pathetic batch file system. There are a few other limitations that come from DOS days.

jpitz• 15 years ago

The Win32 subsystem certainly does enforce, at least in a default install, a lot of conventions that allow the system to maintain backwards compatibility with a long, long, MASSIVE legacy of software. Many, though not all, of them can be changed or disabled. That includes the command processor that interprets the batch language. If you think thats the only shell interpreter that is available for Windows, you should have a look at PowerShell. It's not too shabby.

barrkel2• 15 years ago

There are important reasons why filenames can't be safely made longer for older apps. One of the best things about MS is how well they've focused on backwards compatibility ahead of "technically correct" that works well for nobody but pedants. But for applications that want to opt in to longer paths, they can use '\\?\' prefixes on their absolute paths, and have up to 32K UTF-16 characters.

derefr• 15 years ago

If I were explaining this to someone who didn't want a long story, I would actually say that newer versions of Windows don't rely, at their core, on an implementation of DOS; instead, they rely on an implementation of VMS. :)

The long story: http://everything2.com/title/The+similarities+between+VMS+an...

Does Windows still rely on MS-DOS? - Super User

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