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Comment by matchagaucho | Hacker News Reader

Turtles all the way down.

Windows boots from some DOS and File I/O BIOS interrupts.

That's only true of the lineage commonly known as "9x" that actually started at Windows/386 and ended with Windows Me. Those OSs are actually hypervisors that "hyperjack" MS-DOS when booted and then run DOS and the "user mode" of Windows in VMs. The NT line has always been distinct from that and is a traditional OS architecture.

No it doesn’t. UEFI boots into bootmgr.efi, which loads up winload, which loads either ntoskrnl or hyperv

Maybe pre-UEFI, but the UEFI boot process is completely different.

MS-DOS has never been used in Windows NT and its descendant operation systems to support booting.

Prior to Windows Vista the real mode code in the MBR loads NTLDR[0] which switches to protected mode and runs osloader.exe to boot the kernel. Post-Vista this is handled by the BOOTMGR[1] bootloader.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLDR

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting_process_of_Windows_NT_...

Windows NT and the systems based on it are not based on MS-DOS, but use a virtual machine, NTVDM, to handle the DOS API.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_API

Games like Doom still run on Windows because of this DOS virtualization.

Indeed, which has nothing to do with booting.

Not true since the Win 9x days.

Was 2000 already NT and free of DOS?

Yes, it was the direct successor of NT 4.0. Windows 2000 was still an OS aimed at the "professional" market, though. XP was the first consumer/mainstream oriented OS based on NT.

I used Win2000 as my main desktop for about 3-4 years back in the day. Very stable.

I used win2k for like 10 years and continued to play games it as well. I was able to ride on the XP coat tails because between the two, there were only a handful of win32 APIs that were not implemented in 2000. I ended up having to patch a few DLLs to ignore these missing endpoints, but it meant I could use legitimately the best windows there ever was for a few more years. Eventually I "upgraded" to windows 7 to get reasonable driver support because manufacturers finally stopped shipping 2k compatible drivers.. what a sad day that was.

PC Magazine had the weird idea of shipping a CD-ROM of the Beta release. Having an obsession to try anything I decided to replace win98 with this thing (I had no idea what NT was).

It was so lean, fast and stable that I never used anything else until the day XP had some drivers that were absolutely necessary to use my desktop. 99% of low level crashes would just pop up a notification and nothing more, it was insane.

Windows 2000 was an NT release, but Windows Millenium Edition (Me) was the last generally released DOS-based desktop OS released by Microsoft. Windows Me was released after Windows 2000 by a few months.

Right, I meant to ask for Me, as it was after 9x and still DOS, or?

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