Xbox and Sega

[M3d10n]

Windows 95, 98 and Me, are essentally the same, internally. The difference is the amount of patches and add-ons for extra hardware/software support and interface gizmos.

Noone of those windows are true 32-bit OS'es. While they do some 32-bit tasks, in their deepest areas they work at 16-bit, since the core stuff is still the same from the Windows 3.x.

Those versions were mere updates on the Win3.x core. Microsoft kepts the stuff that worked in there, and added extra code to handle what didn't. They hardly REMOVED code in those implementations. If something is buggy, add extra stuff to handle the bugs, it's their motto.

Windows NT's core (the shell), on the other hand, was written from scratch (not really from scratch, but they actually strated a NEW project instead of patching old ones). Since the semi-16-bit nature of the 3.x/9x series prevented them from working properly on running networks, Microsoft needed a new, pure 32-bit, shell, to compete with the other network-specific OS'es (hereby the name Windows NT - Network).

Windows 2K is actually Windows NT 5.0, and XP is a bizarre update on the Win2K (I think it uses the same shell, but with vast amounts of interface and driver support updates, to make it more friendly).

The hybrid nature of Win9x is the reason it handles memory so ineficiently. It's deepest roots AREN'T supposed do work on multitasking.

 

[Rumata]

Noone of those windows are true 32-bit OS'es. While they do some 32-bit tasks, in their deepest areas they work at 16-bit, since the core stuff is still the same from the Windows 3.x.

Programmer to programmer, can you give me some examples? Most Win 3.x functions were kept for backward compability, other then that there is not much Win 3.x left in there, to the best of my knowlege.

 

[M3d10n]

Some examples...

First, one you can see right away: notice how common 2D animations are much smoother on Windows NT? I mean, menu animations/transistions and the cursor movement itself, run at much higher framerate. That's because it's GDI is 32-bit. The 9x GDI, for compatibility (as they say) works only in 16-bit. It received little modifications from it's 3.x counterpart.

This means it's slow. Really slow. The 16-bit nature of the GDI is the reason DirectX was created. Since the GDI was the one who draw on screen, it's performance was really poor for making windows-based games. That's why most of the *good* games during the 3.x era were DOS-based.

Now, some linking for thinking )I focused my reseach on Window 95, since Windows 98 didn't gring anything new to the core system, being merely a graphic/hardware support update):

Some design flaws.

Agressive, but interesting points. Those are certain annoyances we are so used to, that we end up thinking it HAS to be that way.

Is Windows 95 a real 32-bit OS?

Yet more design flaws we are far too used to in order to notice.

Annoyances.org. How could I forget this one? 🙂

 

[antime]

There were some fundamental core changes between Win95 and Win98, like the introduction of a new driver model. And to say that the Win9x kernels are 16-bit is bullshit. True, there's a lot of modeswitching going on to support legacy apps, but if it were 16-bit it just wouldn't work. And you know the difference between how to render graphics in GDI and DirectX, right?

Personally, I'd say the no.1 cause of Win95 instability is caused by poor drivers which in turn are caused by greedy hardware makers and an appalling DDK. Not running any legacy apps also helps because thay can and do block the rest of the system.

You have to realize that many of the limitations and what we now consider bad design decisions of Win95 were caused by the need to run legacy (DOS and Win16) apps efficiently on the hardware available at launch time. And since Microsoft had publically promise you could run Win16 apps faster with Win95 on a 386 with 4MB memory they used some very clever hacks, which they unfortunately would regret later on. It was all about getting a big market share by allowing people to run all their old apps under the new OS. If Microsoft had known that the Win32 software market would take off like it did I bet they'd done several things differently.