still irritated that the "windows was just a shell for dos" meme will never die. it was literally never true. like. it was just plain never true, ever.
every actual shell was nothing more than a set of on screen shortcuts to DOS system calls, a file browser, and perhaps a shortcut menu. windows 1.0 had a new executable format, thousands of APIs, and it's applications didn't need to touch DOS or the BIOS, they talked through the win16 api. and unlike every other shell in existence, which transferred execution completely over to any DOS app you launched, windows 1 hooked all the BIOS/DOS calls and replaced them with its own routines, then continued executing in parallel. it was halfway to a modern hypervisor even before the 286 was common.
the only reason anyone thought it was "a shell for dos" is because you could launch it from DOS. that's it. it was in fact a monumental accomplishment unmatched by any other product, and the versions that followed were each groundbreaking applications of the x86 platform's capabilities in their own right. microsoft was on some 2000s shit way ahead of their time, but thanks to some smug old men talking about shit they didn't understand on usenet in the mid 90s, they'll be remembered incorrectly forever, and people will continue to have a completely wrong impression of an incredibly important milestone in computing history. i guess this is how anyone feels once they learn anything about actual history versus public perception of it though.
as i read this post i found myself asking, "why is the phrase 'suck their brains out' coming to me?"
oh right. Raymond Chen, thankyou. here's a technical, though recalled-from-memory, deep dive on the process as it stood at the beginning of the Windows 95 era. you can see the effects of the above-mentioned usenet posting and general public reckoning in the way he couches the tale
I may regret answering this question since it’s clear Slashdot bait.
And similarly, the linked post written by Larry Osterman
If there was ever a question that I’m a glutton for punishment, this post should prove it.
i should note that chen's post is about windows 95 (though I believe he did work on 3.x) and Osterman's is also about 95/3.x. osterman seems to have been at MS since 86, so he may have worked on later revisions of win 1 or 2, but nobody ever asks about those afaict. there isn't a lot of horse's-mouth info out there that I"ve found, so I'd have to read the entire windows 1 programmer's guide to try to find out to which degree this is true, but it doesn't really matter
the point is that windows, even 1.0, was obviously far more than "just a shell," but a bunch of guys - the kind who say "Fix Or Repair Daily" every time someone mentions a ford car and expect you to laugh every time - started this misinformed rumor and it had exactly the intended result, maligning Windows forever in the eyes of people who largely don't have the expertise to know what "shell" means and why it would be an insult.
the guys in question were probably mad at microsoft, long before they'd done any of the things that were worth getting mad over. they did this probably for the same reason that they call ford "Fix Or Repair Daily": because one of them had a 20 year old car which he got used, it broke twice (in normal wear parts), and he wanted that to be someone's fault because everything needs to be someone's fault.
the result is the same: endless decades of people repeating a thing that their dad said, which he believed because a coworker said it, until they're a dozen degrees away from any kind of truth, and now you have millions of people wandering around saying a Wrong Thing as if it's the most obvious fact in the world even though they have no firsthand experience and don't, in fact, really understand what the complaint they're repeating even is. and it can never be entirely fixed because it spread so organically. i wonder if there are any parallels to this phenomenon in other, more serious aspects of human society,
