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Technology Stocks : Microsoft - The Evil empire -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lady Lurksalot who wrote (582)	1/22/1998 11:20:00 AM
From: K. M. Strickler	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1600

Holly, Up through WIN 3.11, you are correct. Windows resided on top of DOS and DOS had to be loaded first. With the advent of WIN95, DOS does not have to be loaded first. Now lets look at DOS. In the beginning, (sound familiar) DOS stood for Disk Operating System. We also had TOS ( Tape Operating System ) and also OS (Operating System). DOS is retrieved from magnetic rotating media when something is required, and it is random-sequential access, that means that the disk drive heads are positioned over the cylinder locations, and then when the disk rotates to the proper sector, the information is read. All in all, pretty quick! TOS is retrieved from tape as its' storage media, which is Sequential-Sequential access. This means that from wherever you are, you must move the tape one direction or the other until the desired data is found. There is no 'jumping' of large blocks of data. As you can see, the TOS systems have long since disappeared. (The tape based Radio Shack Model I is an example) Lastly is OS, this is a resident (memory) based operating system, and requires lots of RAM, but is scorchingly fast. In to old days, memory was very expensive, and 2meg was about the top that you could go. The IBM 360 Model 30 had a maximum of 128K (8 bit) memory. 512K (32 bit) was the top for the Model 50, with 2Meg available from a third party. In todays computer systems, there is enough memory usually to have a pretty big chunk committed to the operating system. I am running 65Meg (8 bit) and since a coumpter is 'word' based (8 in the 8088, then 16 somewhere, now 32) my 65Meg looks more like 16Meg, but that is still a ton for now. This means that most systems after boot are pretty much RAM based today. With that being said, I consider all systems that retrieve data from spinning disks as DOS based, so under this, of course, WIN95 IS a DOS system. SO! WIN95 incorporated the operating system into a GUI (point and click) and when Windows load what we used to think of as DOS is loaded also (came from a DISK didn't it!). W3.1, 3.11 had the GUI after Program Manager was launched. By the way, you know that you can still run from the command line in a DOS window under WIN95, which I still do if I can't get what I want from WINDOWS. I was dragged kicking and screaming into the Windows environment as software was orphaned and I needed the newer versions which were only available in a Windows environment. I am sure that there is still an equivilent to SmartKey. I have recently started to use a voice recognition program, and sometime in the future the keyboard will be used for loading and system recovery. We ain't there yet, but they are writing on the wall! As for shelfware, anybody who has been here very long measures it by the pound! Food for thought!