Posted by
michael
on from the chaining-bootloaders-for-fun-and-profit dept.
cpaluc writes "Bored? Surplus spare time and PC hardware? Read on. OSNews has links to a couple of articles (1,2) about a guy who installed 37 operating systems on one PC. There's something to do with your spare time and hardware."
Re:Win earlier than 95 were shells for DOS
by
NineNine
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· Score: 3, Informative
Prior to Win 95? Actually, I consider everything up to and including Win ME to be DOS-based shells.
Re:Win earlier than 95 were shells for DOS
by
gmarceau
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· Score: 3, Informative
To those who have replied to intermodal : You got your definition of an OS all wrong. An OS's job is to mediate between multiple program trying to access to same ressource. That could be the disk, the memory, the ports, the printers, etc. Msdos hardly qualifies, Win3.1 is twisted and Win95 is proper.
Msdos always just barely qualified as an operating system. It had some memory layout libraries and provided some basic disk access libraries, both of which could be ignored by programs. Win3.1 added mediation of screen estate space, of the printers and of the sound card. Those were the bad old days where the high levels function, which had fairly proper mediation, were running on a non-kernel. It was the Eric-the-half-a-bee of operating systems. Painful days indeed.
With its prehemptive scheduler, Win95 introduced clock-cycle mediation. It also brought proper memory mediation (memory "protection") For the first time, Windows was providing something more than a set of ignorable library functions, which qualified it as true OS.
You will indeed find Msdos code shipping with Win95 : it's upside down. It is part of the msoldapp compatibility layer that ran 16-bits apps, and it ran them under the new 32-bits kernel. This doesn't take anything away from Win95's OS-ness.
-- This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
Re:Win earlier than 95 were shells for DOS
by
gmarceau
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· Score: 3, Informative
Preemptive multitasking for 16-bit Windows-based applications Win95:No WinNt:Yes
The compatibility layer which ran old 16-bits apps (winoldapp) wasn't preemptive, but the main kernel certainly was.
-- This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
Re:An attempt to name 37 operating systems
by
403Forbidden
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· Score: 3, Informative
I saw this on TheScreenSavers awhile back. If i recall he had multiple XOSL (www.xosl.org) bootloaders and it worked in chains.. one XOSL would boot another which would boot another etc. until you got to the OS of choice
The OSes he booted were not all unique kernels, there were about 10 different linux distros if i remember right, and Win 1.0-XP i belive.
You can't name 37 OS'es? You should take a look here - sorry about the offensive domain name, but they really do have a very long list of OS'es, both old and new!
-- Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Slashdot Mirror
We do this all the time with VMWare on big GSX/ESX servers. Not that many DIFFERENT OS's, just that many of them.
He could probably count each JDK as an OS too.
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They weren't technically operating systems
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I saw this on TheScreenSavers awhile back. If i recall he had multiple XOSL (www.xosl.org) bootloaders and it worked in chains.. one XOSL would boot another which would boot another etc. until you got to the OS of choice
The OSes he booted were not all unique kernels, there were about 10 different linux distros if i remember right, and Win 1.0-XP i belive.
You can't name 37 OS'es? You should take a look here - sorry about the offensive domain name, but they really do have a very long list of OS'es, both old and new!
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'