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Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

MS-DOS became obsolete only at the launch of Windows 95.

Until then, all the applications that could be found for Windows 3.0 or Windows 3.1 looked like worthless toys in comparison with the professional applications that were available for MS-DOS, despite the fact that the latter had to struggle with extended memory or expanded memory in order to use more than 640 kB of memory.

From 1990 to 1995, I had Windows 3.0, then 3.1, then 3.11 and I launched them from time to time, for fun, but to accomplish real work I always had to go back to MS-DOS.

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At first Windows 95 was not great for games, so at least through 1996-97 many games were still released for MS-DOS and often only for MS-DOS, or only had Windows ports later.

Looking back from now, I wish that era could have continued much longer, as running MS-DOS games in emulators is so much easier and more stable than to run old Windows games.

Additionally, Microsoft had a first attempt to a gaming API for Windows, which mostly one those of us that were alive back then remember it, given how hard it is to search for it on the Internet.

Really, how come anyone find something about WinG, if they don't know what they are actually searching for?

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/a-whirlwind-tour-o...

https://betawiki.net/wiki/WinG

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinG

Also it took until DirectX 5, to have it be usable for games.

> MS-DOS became obsolete only at the launch of Windows 95.

Not even. The genius of Windows 95 was you could still run most of your DOS crap. (Maybe not games, but business apps.) Novell shops for example had a huge pile of DOS drivers and all that just worked underneath 95. DOS only faded away afterwards.

When I started playing with Windows 95 I worked in a Novell shop, and was really impressed with the effort MS put into implementing the Netware networking stack. I had expected strong LANMan drivers and indifferent Netware drivers, but MS obviously knew where the market lay.

Aldus PageMaker is a toy for you ? I remember clearly it working on Windows 3.0

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