Ex-Caldera dev describes lost “WinBolt” Win9x-capable version of DR-DOS (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Caldera dev describes lost “WinBolt” Win9x-capable version of DR-DOS (2007)

msfn.org

147 pointsLammy52 comments

> No, as Microsoft has artificially tied MS-DOS 7.xx and Windows 4.xx together and it is not trivial to pry these components apart.

This is a half-truth, due to the word "artificially" -- it implies nefarious intent by Microsoft to not let you run Windows 9x on just any old DOS. Microsoft determined with Windows 95 that Windows would be their primary operating system, and while it was still architecturally similar to the older 1.x-3.x versions that would install and run on top of MS-DOS (including various versions of which), that both components would be improved by developing them together. The original Windows 95's version of MS-DOS ("7.0") added support for logical block addressing and long file names in FAT. The second one in 95B ("MS-DOS 7.1") added support for FAT32. The Windows Me version ("MS-DOS 8.0")... well ok I don't really know of any practical changes aside from no longer parsing config.sys/autoexec.bat.

Still there were obvious compatibility and practical advantages to developing them in tandem. Massive improvements in the file system were feasible in the era that 2GB and larger disks started appearing on the market, simplified boot process as it was assumed that Windows would always be expected, some data structures could be rearranged or axed in order to allow Windows itself to manage resources.

It’s not as clear cut as that. There was a non-Microsoft DOS (might have been Dr DOS but I can’t recall specifically) that would boot Windows 95. Then Microsoft released an update that caused Windows 95 to fail with an vague error message intending to deceive users into thinking there was a technical limitation in other DOSs that prevented Windows from booting. Yet it was later proved that limitation didn’t exist and all Windows was doing was checking if it was MS-DOS, and if not returning an error.

If I recall correctly this case even went to court.

That sounds like the beta of Windows 3.1 and the AARD code, which is most definitely in the “dirty tricks” column for Microsoft.

Ah yes it was. Sorry about that.

> it implies nefarious intent by Microsoft to not let you run Windows 9x on just any old DOS

Yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code#Memos

That was not for Windows 9x.

Ah yeah, my bad, I guess it's just coincidence how the CEO, Co-President, and SVPs explicitly stated they didn't want Windows to be able to run on any non-Microsoft DOS and then the next major version of Windows wasn't able to be "integrated" with any non-Microsoft DOS.

Also total coincidence how the same strategy played out with their web browser a couple years later http://toastytech.com/evil/fof.html :)

From a purely technical point of view, what would you have wanted next? Windows XP running "on" DOS? And the irony is that it was not even that much different on that point: Windows 9x did not really run "on" DOS either. It had some form of "cooperation" (for legacy drivers only) / backward compat. And it was booted form there. And you could still run DOS bare-metal. For most users, the DOS parts were perceived as deprecated anyway; aligned with the fact they officially were...

And well even in the Windows 3 era DOS was merely used as a bootloader on modern machines. Of course Windows 9x took the concept even further. The contextual difference was simply that there was tons of DOS programs and games even when 3.x was out (esp. games) and that even if that continued a little bit for games, it quickly migrated as Windows 9x became a comprehensive platform with the needed APIs (plus more and more people having it). And the default boot UX that was kept as-is by most people.

So from a market perspective, 3rd party DOS + Windows 9x would probably have died well for 98 anyway, and probably become ultra-niche way before (well, was probably niche already just before the 95 launch...)

Not to say MS did not have anti-competitive behaviors during that era (or attempts e.g. the AARD incident), and of course even just strategies to compete. They are actually well-documented thanks to various trials. But there is also the usual taking of random tech dependencies for granted until the main vendor suddenly changes its stack: and OMG you can't run booted from another DOS. Hell even when parts of the tech stacks were actually documented, licensed and supported, sometimes it stopped to be the case on the next iteration: and then you can't use a Cyrix processor on a MB with an Intel chipset anymore. It is not necessarily an abuse of dominant position all the times.

And here the point of the original post was to say there could have been a Win9x capable DR-DOS, so I don't even see why you are talking about "the next major version of Windows wasn't able to be "integrated" with any non-Microsoft DOS" when it clearly could: simply the compatible 3rd party DOS capable of that was not commercialized. Should MS have been forced of cooperating with other companies to have parts of their OS interchangeable? I'm not sure. Apple surely did not have to e.g. thoroughly document and then advertise their PowerPC nanokernel as reimplementable by 3rd parties (not an exact equivalent, but it is impossible to come with exactly the same scope given the two systems are so different, so I'm just taking a random component that can be distinguished from well-known and previously existing one) -- but then if some found an interest in doing that without support, they also could have done so.

There were a lot of games which were DOS only or which required special HW for the windows version. So DOS was, more or less needed. Besides games were also engineering applications for example, who did not had yet a windows version (pspice, orcad) so people really needed DOS. It was later (win 98 era ) when the programs were "ported" to windows.

Performance was truly a major factor for that, even today.

Even if Windows 98 would be installed on the machine, running the software on plain MS-DOS would be drastically faster on those days when having less services/GUI on the background.

They would access the extended memory using the HIMEM.SYS driver and the run the software as bare-metal as possible. Not very different from what happens with linux servers nowadays.

I agree. Windows 9x's reliance on internal MS-DOS data structures was not done for "artificial" reasons:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=24063

This does not seem like a reliable source about Microsoft's actions in the 90s. What are they gonna do? Blog about how they're guilty of anticompetitive behavior?

I don't remember Raymond Chen ever lying. If there weren't legitimate reasons, Raymond would just not talk about them. Especially since this would be a very elaborate, multi-faceted lie that anybody with an intermediate knowledge of the inner workings of Windows 9x would've been able to call out.

I guess I'm expecting lies of omission here. My guess is that content on Microsoft's blogs, especially about this period is cleared with legal before anything goes up.

Raymond Chen may not intentionally lie, but he can be wrong and has been wrong in the past. One obvious example that I remember is when he said that the reason Pinball.exe disappeared from Windows Vista was because they couldn't port it to 64 bits. And yet as I read every single clickbait newssite parrot what he was saying, I was literally playing 64-bit Pinball.exe on a standard Windows XP x64 edition ...

The comments in his blog disappear every time Microsoft shuffles it around, so these discussions are lost forever.

Not lost, for now: <http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/index.htm>. (Thankfully, MSDN blog comments didn’t require JavaScript, or they would now be lost...) Here’s the Pinball piece, for example: <http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20121218_294_...>.

It was probably the 32 bit version of pinball, running on 64 bit windows via WoW64

No. Easily distinguishable by the * (or lack of it) in task manager.

Not much in there require the DOS version to be precisely MS-DOS; on the contrary it was done mainly for compat with 3rd party code which e.g. "knew" where the DOS structures were, and surprise 3rd party DOS obviously had to be compatible on those points.

Now remains the "suck the brains out" problem, and although it could have been easily solved cooperatively IMO, it is illustrative of why people would not have needed 3rd party DOS when Windows 9x was running anyway: the kernel did nothing, the libs were mostly irrelevant (and MS-DOS probably gave that small compat edge even there, simply because its prevalence even before 9x), and the cmd line tools, well a) who cares about the tools b) actually if you do I suppose that was the easiest things to run (and if not: the irony; oh it is scandalous that windows relies on internals of MSDOS -- but not that e.g. Caldera DOS tools relies on internals of their DOS kernel)?

Caldera would have needed a Windows clone to compete. DOS was just becoming irrelevant.

Once you postulate a reality where Windows 95 was an unbundled product, a few things change:

* It becomes much easier to make legal noise about Microsoft pricing. If they're saying "Buy Windows 4.0 and we'll give you MS-DOS 7.0 free, or for some token sum" it's pretty obviously market dumping. If you had to pay, hypothetically $50 for MS-DOS 7 and $50 for "Windows 4", instead of a single $100 package, Caldera can compete with a $30 DR-DOS product even without having a Windows clone.

* There could still be a territory war over the quality of the underlying DOS. This was still a time when you'd have a lot of games, in particular, that required a drop down to DOS mode.

* There was also the opportunity to sell features that still had DOS components involved more modularly. I'm thinking about FAT32 in particular, because I can recall radio advertisements boasting about it to try to sell Win95 users on upgrading to 98 or 98SE. What if you could pay $10 and get a DR-DOS competitive upgrade that supported it instead of a full $100 upgrade with a bunch of features you didn't care about?

In such an environment, there could have still been 5 or so years of DR-DOS as a viable commercial product until the much less unbundlable NT-based Windows went mainstream. That's a significant amount of runway. Their pivot from there is not obvious-- I can imagine some attempt at a Linux distribution with a tightly integrated WINE setup, but that might have been too much to ask for at the time.

I also wonder how a Microsoft that had been clearly slapped and told "you must play well with others" in 1995 or so would have behaved over the next 20 years. The trajectory of IE would have likely been very different, and I wonder if they would have handled some of the other Office competitors with kid gloves to avoid legal scrutiny. Maybe even some healing of the rift with IBM on OS/2, so they could point and say "look, we're interoperable, here's another compatible product."

The trouble with FAT32 being a feature to sell DOS is that Windows 9x doesn't use DOS to access the filesystem in normal circumstances. AFAIK it had a compatability path that could use DOS, but then you'd be slowing stuff down.

I can only imagine bad things happening if Windows and DOS disagree on filesystem aspects.

That's why the Windows 95 CD-ROM version shipped with the "LFNB" long filename backup utility https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/135/Q135315/

> Caldera would have needed a Windows clone to compete. DOS was just becoming irrelevant.

Well, Digital Research had GEM[0] since mid-80's. Development was probably halted after Novell or even Caldera acquisitions.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)

There is also an elephant in the room with all these questions about the messy interactions between Windows 9x and DOS - Windows NT. By 1995 Microsoft’s long view of the future of the PC OS did not involve DOS. Even before NT we had OS/2 as well.

If Microsoft had been “nicer” they could have made it easier for DR to use their DOS to load a GUI that mostly acted as its own OS and bypassed DOS once loaded, but what happens once they get to XP?

(Of course DR / Novell kinda knew this hence stuff like Star Trek, but whatever DR’s vision of the future was never came).

The LFN portion of the original W95 was implemented in vxd's, not in the base DOS. If one created the boot disk / recovery disk, which then ran a base DOS 7, it had no LFN support.

LFN support did work in windowed command prompts, as there the vxd's were present and provided the extra int21 support. I rather doubt that changed through any of the later versions, as there was no engineering need.

Schulman's book described this in great detail.

The LBA format drives, and using different partition types would be entirely handled in the disk driver level, hence trivial.

FAT32 was a smaller and simpler change, as it would largely be driver level, larger FAT entries, and then treating the root directory as if it was any other directory (hence growable), rather than "special" (fixed) as in prior versions of DOS.

MS could have maintained backwards compatibility if they wanted. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii... "On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95."

I seem to remember successfully upgrading a machine with IBM PC DOS 7 and Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. There were issues with a few DOS commands later as some had been upgraded and others remained the IBM version.

Ah, the memories. Back in the days when Microsoft could be openly and blatantly anti-competitive and nobody really cared because it was just perceived as a nerd-fight outside of tech circles.

It was just a coincidence that MS decided to make some changes to Win95 that made it depend on things in MS-DOS that DR-DOS didn't have, but then when DR-DOS caught up, they still had Win9x complain about "incompatible" DOS.

But somehow MS managed to maintain backwards compatibility with SimCity. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281932

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...

Surely this is old enough now that they could surface the fork on an OS / DOS enthusiast site, the same thing for Apple Star Trek (also on DRDOS).

  > the same thing for Apple Star Trek (also on DRDOS)

Huh! I was unaware that Project Star Trek sat upon DR-DOS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project#Architecture

Fascinating. Gives extra context/colour to DR-GEM running on TOS, and later ties of codenames Borg (OS/2 2.1) and Ferengi (OS/2 for Windows).

TOS was GEM + GEMDOS on 68k, which was really a kind of ... rewrite of CP/M 68k, but with DOS-ish additions. Many of the internals and source code look identical/similar to CP/M 68k.

(GEM itself had its genesis with Lee Jay Lorenzen moving from Xerox (in Dallas, not PARC) to DR. At Xerox he'd tried to float the idea of a Xerox Star-like interface on PC class hardware. He ended up doing that once he moved to DR, as GEM. It has Mac influences, for sure, but it was their own creation.)

http://www.cpm.z80.de/source.html

http://www.deltasoft.com/downloads-gemworld.htm

Kind of wonder how much of that DNA made it into DR-DOS and Concurrent DOS.

I don't get why you would really want to run Windows 9x with another DOS. It was only used as a bootloader, when Windows started of course the Windows kernel would get full control of the system, leaving MS-DOS only resident for compatibility with legacy software, and nothing mode.

What difference could it make to run a better version of DOS on Windows 9x machines?

Windows 9x actually does use MS-DOS for more than just a bootloader. The post describes it in better detail than I actually understand, but they do also briefly list the advantages in the second line of the post from the link, too:

> Yes, it is possible to run Windows 9x ontop of DR-DOS. And yes, it has several advantages over using MS-DOS (f.e. smaller memory footprint and much more advanced relocation methods, not only resulting in more free DOS memory, but also in more free Windows resources; better configurability and therefore higher flexibility, more advanced utilities).

While the merits of combining DOS and Windows is economically debatable, the memory layout of 95 is really well-thought out and DR really didn't realise that certain programs would just "slide" out of their allocated memory range even theoretically no programs should do that (there is already a warning in beta versions that has tighter memory layouts, and DR conveniently forgot how changing the DPMI implementation, even though it should just work, actually isn't). Microsoft is simply trying to minimise problematic applications at the expense of memory consumption.

> Actually, there is a reason why I am writing this on a dual-core machine in a Windows 98 SE window... ;-)

Nice. Win 98 SE isn't all that old (roughly the same Win32 API that evolved into Windows 10) but it does still evoke that retrocomputing vibe.

Has me wondering if there's another system that I could still use along similar lines. Needing internet and a web browser certainly narrows down the list fast. I don't know that the Commander X-16 could do it, though not an actual retro OS. Or perhaps Mac System 7.

Windows 98 SE was not only quite fast but also very stable. I preferred it greatly to Windows 2k. There were unfortunately nothing to be gained in Windows ME so that's why some people were still running it in 2007 such as at the link. Speed wise Windows 2k and Linux were comparable in speed and stability in 2003 on the 90's pentium machines, but Windows 98 SE was blazing fast.

Yep Win98 SE was a local maxima for performance/stability. For the WinNT line, I used 3.51 for as long as I could, before giving in to Win2k and later for laptop support.

Wait, can you expand on that? Was NT4 less stable? I know you already had the 32bit app compatibility, but I don't think I've ever met anyone who preferred the Win3 UI to Win95.

On NT 3.51 you can install the NewShell update and the UI becomes more like Win95

I had no problems with the Win3 UI and was never into using themes, choosing background/window trim colour was fine. The Win2k one looked newer. The only real benefit was that there were some new admin views. I mean look at modern file/web browsers, they don't have much in the way of raised/sunken UI elements.

I was a developer so cared more about performance and stability. How my code editor windows looked didn't matter. Memory being taken up by a fatter UI implementation that slows things down counts against it.

Edit: and yes, win2k/NT4 was less stable. They moved the graphics subsystem into kernel space where as NT up to 3.5.1 had graphics as a separate service. And you can imagine that a lot of the bugs/edge cases in Windows is in the GUI and drivers.

I suppose it depended what you were doing. You couldn't beat Windows 98 for how light it was on RAM. Probably the fastest for DirectX games and so on vs. the competition. Fastest to boot and open up a word processor.

But I have the distinct recollection of it being excruciating for multitasking. Towards the end of Windows 98's life you might ask it to run a video player, a game, a chat client, a browser and a word processor all at once. Stability disappeared. So did responsiveness. Windows 2000 (or Linux) handled heavy load much better.

I ended up choosing Win 98 SE for my "retro" gaming computer. I use it to go back and play the games from my childhood that broke on NT based Windows releases.

When it came up was probably the first time in a decade or more that I'd heard the click/buzz of a floppy drive in person.

I still do a good portion of my creative writing in Microsoft Word 97.

I have a genuine disk copy of Office '97 around here somewhere...

Your best bet may be a Unix workstation. IRIX in particular still gets modern software ported to it sometimes: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/cd5x78...

Mac System 7 is probably no good - the modern web is largely unintelligable to the contemporary browsers. I had a Mac Plus for a while hooked up to a Gatorbox that had internet access, and the version of Netscape(?) on there couldn't even load the Google home page.

The Amiga guys are pretty fanatical, might be worth investigating that. Old Sun workstations are too feeble to run a modern web browser. Never had an SGI (always wanted one) but again has a devoted fan base.

I think if you need modern but want retro, configure a Linux with the Motif Window Manager and enjoy that CDE, post Unix wars goodness while still being able to run a bit of modern stuff.

I prefer the aesthetics of Sun Open Look or NeXTSTEP which doesn't get carried away with as many levels of visual depth. WindowMaker is a pretty good NeXT desktop experience.

dillo might run

or this fairly recent one https://retrosystemsrevival.blogspot.com/2018/05/k-meleon-74...

https://archive.is/nVHPi

the only mention of lost is "lost hope" .. I'm not sure he lost the source, or maybe I misread.

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