Hi,



I thought 16-bit and 32 bit were the external data bus and 32-bit and 64-bit ere the internal data bus. You could very well be correct about the data bus - I find that I am getting more confused on details I've not accessed in the past 5 or so years (I'm 60 years old).



I do not think this is correct. I go to the double click on (for instance) TC.BAT (Turbocad dos v1.8 - 1990) and it runs. The icon for it does not have the compatibility mode turned on.

I used the Home Edition for a while but liked the PRO version much better.

As a side comment, IIRC the first "Windows OS (3.1?) was an I/O grphics system that ran on top of DOS.

In preference, I would have chosen Mac over Windows, but I worked in ISA style expansion card companies and their policy was that once the product was released, they wanted all the prototypes removed from the building. The engineering group was allowed to take them home for their personal use.

Thanks for the help.

Doug vV

ALL the original versions of Windows ran on top of DOS.

I had as little to do with versions of Windows pre 3.0 as I could -- I think it was John Dvorak of PC Magazine who aptly described one of the earlier versions as a cruel six-year-old child's crayon drawing of the Mac interface.

I actually liked the way 3.0 worked and looked, although when 3.1 (and networked 3.11) came out I adopted them pretty quickly as being better.

Interestingly enough, one of the features of Windows 95 (and original Windows 98) was that the upper 'graphical interface' layers of the OS were implemented as an overlay on the core OS (which was remarkably stable in and of itself). It was quite possible to write a different 'front end' that got rid of most of the bugginess and other issues most people had with 95; in a controlled environment (e.g. with hardware specificity like that implicitly provided on contemporary Macs) the underlying OS code could be almost as stable as a RTOS. If I remember correctly, that is the first Microsoft OS that was 'assembled from a kit of parts at runtime' so there was the effect of very late binding (and easy accommodation of whatever hardware or software was present at instantiation). (This when runtime binding in Objective-C was being touted as the greatest thing since sliced bread ... but not documented for 'normal people' who wanted to learn the methodologies behind it.)

Mind you, I'm not complaining that Ballmer et al. pushed the adoption of "NT" architecture, with its goofy and extremely overcomplicated 'enterprise IT' style complications and reliance on integrity of a single registry for all the functionalities, instead. But that's another story for a much more computer-oriented forum.

Hi,

Do you have a reccommended forum for the discussion of PCs?

Thanks.

Doug vV