@dosnostalgic let's be fair: Windows wasn't letting you "boot into the legacy OS", it was just letting you quit out of the shell, because at the time, it was literally just a fancy GUI shell for DOS, and remained so (for home users, enterprise users got NT in the early 90s) until Windows XP
@vinesnfluff No. Windows 9x was not "just a fancy GUI shell for DOS". In fact it was sort of the other way around. It was a full on standalone OS that had legacy DOS support fully integrated in its kernel. But if you wanted an actual MS-DOS you had to reboot. There was nothing to quit to, as DOS 7 that was used as a bootloader was completely gone by the time Win9x was running.
@dosnostalgic@vinesnfluff when the black screen told you in orange letters that it was safe to shut the computer off, you literally had a shell, you just had to run the commands to clear the screen. Not saying win95 was just a fancy gui for dos, nor do I remember how functional that shell was given that I was in primary school when I messed around with it, but it was at the very least somewhat functional.
@kly@vinesnfluff That only happened when you had a shitty DOS driver sitting in memory refusing to shut down. That command prompt was still very much Windows. If you didn't, there's nothing you could do on that screen besides shut your machine off.
@dosnostalgic@kly PS this was a clean install. Or, cleanish. I did install the drivers needed to get sound/graphics properly out of 86box, cuz if I was setting this up, I might as well have it ready to screw around with some gaems.
@vinesnfluff@kly Yeah, so I've done some testing. When you "Restart in MS-DOS mode" 95 runs its command.com. You can see it still sitting in memory when you do MEM after booting Win from it. That's what you're quitting into when you're on the shutdown screen. It's a 16 bit program that 95 kept running, since it was there before Windows was loaded. But that's not the case when it starts normally.
@vinesnfluff@kly Oh, and if you properly exit DOS 7 using EXIT, then it actually quits, 95 loads, and once again you can do nothing on the shutdown screen.
@vinesnfluff@kly Now bonus:
When you start 95 normally, go and rename Command.com in WINDOWS directory to something else. That's it. No more restarting in MS-DOS, no more command prompt in 95, no more Command Prompt Only from the boot menu. But 95 will still load, and besides the prompt you're able to run any DOS program, and minimize them, and try to put them in windowed mode, etc.
Everything works as intended.
@dosnostalgic@vinesnfluff@kly It's been years, but IIRC, if you boot to MS-DOS mode, run win to start Windows, then select Shut Down, it'll have a prompt behind the "It's safe to shut down" screen (and you can run cls to actually see it). If you boot Windows normally, there's no prompt.
@dosnostalgic You would have loved the old Windows NT bootloader which let you boot multiple different versions of the OS out of different subdirectories. (e.g. C:\NT3.1, C:\NT35, C:\NTbeta, etc)
@dosnostalgic I had a machine in the office with a PCM/CIA Flash card programmer in it. Needed to be in DOS mode for the programmer software to work, and needed to be in W95 in order to transfer the data on the network. We just put up with stuff like that back then.
@dosnostalgic VAX/VMS circa 1978 used to boot with PDP-11 RSX-11M compatibility mode available and a fair chunk of the apps in the early VAX/VMS versions were RSX-11M apps running in compatibility mode.
The VAX-11 boxes supported PDP-11 instructions in hardware.
You could run your existing PDP-11 RSX-11M apps directly, too.
That all ended at VAX/VMS V4.0 (~1984), and with then-new VAX models after VAX 8600.
VAX 8600 was originally to be named VAX-11/790, but marketing marketed and dropped the -11 with the “architecture for the ‘80s”.
PDP-11 RSX-11M compatibility mode became a separate product, and the PDP-11 instructions were emulated, and the -11 was dropped from VAX.
Technically, an LSI-11 console processor booted RT-11 from the 8” console floppy which then booted the VAX-11/780 (organizationally within he hardware, the VAX was an enormous LSI-11 peripheral) which ran VAX and PDP-11 instructions and which could run simh emulator to emulate PDP-11 running RT-11. If the LSI-11 failed—as happened on a couple of occasions—the VAX could continue to run. Just not reboot.
The approach Apple used for migrations with Rosetta and Rosetta 2 was far smoother.
Yeah. Fun times. When it all worked.
There are shenanigans in newer boxes too, but they’re usually somewhat better hidden.
The approach Apple used for migrations with Rosetta and Rosetta 2 was far smoother.
NT had (16-bit) x86 emulation on non-x86 Windows version from the beginning (then DEC made 32-bit x86 support for NT Alpha). Nowadays ARM64 Windows runs both x86 and x64 programs.
@dosnostalgic Still upset that Microsoft was able to hide the 95 code and put Word Perfect, Borland and other competitors out of business. Thanks Bill Clinton.
@dosnostalgic@codinghorror This prompt and the buttons just felt weird to me. The question begins with "are you sure you want to" so it looks like a yes-no question, and the buttons are for a yes-no question and yet it is actually a multiple choice question!
Why didn't they rephrase the prompt to be "what would you like to do", remove the question marks from the selections, and change the buttons to read "continue" and "cancel" respectively?
@dosnostalgic clear options, obvious ways to cancel completely out of it if you clicked by mistake, dimming the rest of the screen so it took your focus and gave you the power, and a help button that actually tried to help.
No dark patterns, no marketing, no patronising, no "this nameless system icon is preventing your computer from restarting", no "we rebooted automatically for updates, all your work is gone and all your tabs will reload". I miss not arguing with my PC just to get things done.
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