Remember, this was way before Windows.
it’s 1994
Windows 3.1 came out in 1992. Yes you still were in DOS a lot back then, but it was hardly “way before windows”.
Speaking of just hunting for random stuff in DOS, my personal favorite “what’s this?” in DOS was Gorillas.bas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)?wprov=sfti1
I agree, but Windows 3.x was more a shell on top of MSDOS and had a more niche market, and windows 95 didn’t get most popular OS until late 1998. So for a lot of people that was way before windows. Also tech went a lot faster back then. Updates to an old system isn’t as important if it’s not connected to the world of online hackers.
Windows 95 was also a shell on top of MSDOS. Windows NT wasn’t running on top of DOS, but it was primarily for business use until Windows XP.
This is a common misconception, and it’s funny that people still believe it all these years later.
While it’s true that Windows 95 relied on MS-DOS for bootstrapping and provided a DOS-like interface for running legacy applications, it wasn’t “just a shell” on top of DOS. Windows 95 introduced a 32-bit multitasking environment, a completely new user interface, and a separate set of APIs for software development (Win32). It had its own kernel that provided services like memory management and hardware abstraction, separate from DOS.
The integration with DOS was mainly for backward compatibility, allowing users to run older software. But once you were in the Windows 95 environment, DOS was essentially sidelined, and Windows 95’s own features and architecture took over.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. Windows 95 used MSDOS to boot, but once it was booted, it completely removed any trace of MSDOS and replaced it with its own MSDOS subsystem. It’s more like MSDOS was a shell on top of Win95, but MSDOS was required to get the kernel loaded.
