Реферат: Making Utilities For MSDOS Essay Research Paper

is a very good step. Given the volatility of DOS internals, the DOSMGR

subcomponent of DOS386 (which, remember, is perhaps the heaviest user of DOS

internals) cetainly should be tied to one specific DOS version. However, the tie

between DOS/DOS386 and Windows is largely artificial. Try a simple experiment.

Rename KRNL386.EXE file in your WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory into something else,

and put something else (COMMAND.COM fits nicely) into that directory under the

name KRNL386.EXE. And then try to run Windows. But instead of running Windows,

this would load and activate Win386 without loading Windows. And there is no

magic in this simple experiment. KRNL386.EXE is the first module of Windows, and

Win386 runs it when it completes its initialization. By putting something else

in place of KRNL386.EXE, one can break the artificial tie between Windows and

DOS386.

At some point of time Microsoft probably throught of making a version of DOS386

which would not be tied to Windows. There was an utility called MSDPMI in the

beta release of Microsoft C/C++ Compiler version 7.00, which was that very

DOS386 without Windows. But now Microsoft is abandoning MS-DOS and everything

else that is not Windows. Microsoft tries to persuade users that Windows 95

doesn’t contain a DOS component, but this is not true. It is simply tied into

Windows.

Now let’s summarize the above. Microsoft is ignoring the minority users who

don’t like Windows and who want to use MS-DOS and DOS386 without Windows,

because Microsoft cares only about its profit. One person cannot stop them doing

that. Therefore, we, the programmers, should unite. If I call Microsoft alone,

no one would listen to me. But if thousands of us do it together, we might

achieve something. If you have any questions or suggestions about creating an

association of programmers against Microsoft, please send E-mail to Michael

Sokolov at [email protected].

Bibliography

Brown, Ralf. The MS-DOS Interupt List. Not published on paper, available online