Wow – my mind was blown as someone who was always told that "Win9x is MS-DOS with a graphical shell", with how in Windows 9x "enhanced"/32-bit mode, there's actually a general-purpose "microkernel"/VMM that handles core facilities and context switching between Windows and MS-DOS. I was always under the impression that Win9x was just a hack, but it seems there was eventually a more robust architecture.
> "Win9x is MS-DOS with a graphical shell"
I think if you replaced “Win9x” with Windows 3.1 - or earlier - it would be true.
I knew before I clicked this that it would be a Raymond Chen article
what I'd really like is some comparison between all OSs in handling these and maybe we'd have new OS some day? I remember the scintillating days of OS/2 Warp/BeOS/linux distros and everything called itself windows killer. I feel like an old man shouting at cloud but I swear Windows used to be slow and then got pretty snappy around windows2000 and nowadays I feel like it's back to win98 days in terms of latency/response
Depends on the hardware used to run it. Windows 98 on a Pentium 2 or 3 with 64+ MB RAM is quite snappy.
… sounds like this is why Win 95 seemed to crash all the time.
As time has gone on I have become increasingly impressed by the fact that Windows 9x worked at all. There’s so many of these things that sound like they should individually cause the system to be crashing constantly, and yet somehow they got it to mostly work.
> There’s so many of these things that sound like they should individually cause the system to be crashing constantly, and yet somehow they got it to mostly work.
You just described all of humanity.
If you enter C:\PROGRA~1 during setup, you end up with Program Files being the only folder in the C: drive.