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by 1970-01-0110 hours ago|

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I suppose it isn't if you never had it on real hardware. Win32 was well marked as the complete OS takeover for the PC. DOS remained only to boot Windows and as backup OS. If you absolutely needed to jump back to DOS you still could, however you were heavily expected to force your DOS programs to launch and live in their own little DOS environments, much to everyone's chagrin.

by aleph_minus_one1 hours ago|

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> I suppose it isn't if you never had it on real hardware. Win32 was well marked as the complete OS takeover for the PC. DOS remained only to boot Windows and as backup OS. If you absolutely needed to jump back to DOS you still could, however you were heavily expected to force your DOS programs to launch and live in their own little DOS environments, much to everyone's chagrin.

I remember that at the time of Windows 95, I very often had to boot back to DOS 7.0 (which was also delivered as part of the Windows installation) to run DOS games, which were still very popular until like the middle of the 00 years.

And yes, when Windows XP came out (2001), people were somewhat disappointed that you couldn't simply boot DOS anymore to play your old beloved games. Over the years, DOSBox got sufficiently stable and PCs got sufficiently powerful that this gap could be closed.

by ralferoo32 minutes ago|

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I've forgotten now when it changed, but I remember older versions of Windows let you exit back to DOS once you'd finished doing GUI stuff. I'm guessing that was probably removed in Win95 as that was the first "proper" Windows that didn't rely on already having DOS (IIRC).

by aleph_minus_one6 minutes ago|

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> I've forgotten now when it changed, but I remember older versions of Windows let you exit back to DOS once you'd finished doing GUI stuff. I'm guessing that was probably removed in Win95 as that was the first "proper" Windows that didn't rely on already having DOS (IIRC).

Until Windows 3.x this was possible (though not recommended). With Windows 95, there was a boot menu that you could access via the F8 key - my previous post should make it very clear why I still have this in my muscle memory after 20-30 years. Via this boot menu, you could boot into DOS 7.0 (or if an older DOS version was installed before the Windows 95 installation, also this older DOS version). In DOS, you could still run

> win

to get to Windows 95.

by yellowapple6 hours ago|

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It's the “own little DOS environments” that makes WINSTART.BAT's functionality surprising for people who ain't intimately familiar with the Windows 3.1/9x architecture, because those DOS environments are launched from within Windows but without running anything in WINSTART.BAT. Most people would expect those DOS environments to be running inside the Windows environment, not in parallel with / independent from it.