Реферат: Making Utilities For MSDOS Essay Research Paper

Windows 95 Device Development Kit (DDK), and I don’t have a copy of it yet.

However, it is quite possible that the IFSMGR’s interface is reentrant. If it is,

all problems with SteelBox would be immediately solved, and it won’t contain a

single undocumented DOS call. Keep in mind, however, that DOS386 is relatively

new, and perhaps its current version doesn’t provide all the desired

functionality. But certainly DOS386 is definitely a good foundation for a new

operating system.

Although I definitely don’t want to overblame Microsoft, I have to say some

unpleasant truth about this company. In their run for profit, people at

Microsoft violates some principles of free enterprize. In other words, they try

to make a monopoly. One of the unfair things Microsoft does is called

discriminatory documentation. Although the source code for MS-DOS, Microsoft

Network, and other Microsoft products is supposedly unavailable to anyone,

Microsoft has made the source code of some utilities available to selected

vendors (Schulman et al., Undocumented DOS, 495).

Another example is the deliberate incompatibility of some Microsoft products

with Digital Research’s DR-DOS. Some programs, including Microsoft Windows

version 3.10 beta and Microsoft C Compiler version 6.00, contain special code

with sole purpose of making them incompatible with DR-DOS and other DOS

workalikes. Although I’m definitely not a supporter of DOS workalikes, I think

that Microsoft should use fair methods of competition.

Finally, there is a big problem with Microsoft’s packaging of MS-DOS and DOS386.

The most important problem with DOS386 is that it’s currently available to users

only as Win386 in Microsoft Windows. Furthermore, the usual Windows technical

documentation (except the DDK) doesn’t even mention the existence of Win386,

because it’s actually not a part of Windows. As a result, an amasing number of

programmers don’t even know about DOS386 (or Win386), and many of those how do

greatly underestimate its tremendous importance.

Now Windows 95 comes into play. In this package, MS-DOS, DOS386, and Windows are