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Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems?

(devblogs.microsoft.com)
305 points mooreds | 1 comments | 17 Nov 24 19:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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jmclnx ◴[17 Nov 24 20:19 UTC] No.42166830[source]▶
I never thought of Windows 3.1 as an OS. The other 2 was MS-DOS and Windows 95.
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rusk ◴[17 Nov 24 21:05 UTC] No.42167247[source]▶
Agree, the terminology in those days was “shell”.

Though Windows 95 was arguably similar running atop “DOS 7” it actually imposes its own 32-bit environment with its own “protected mode” drivers once booted. Dropping to DOS reverted to “real mode”.

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tliltocatl ◴[17 Nov 24 21:13 UTC] No.42167329[source]▶
So did the lastest Win3.1 for workgroups, just MS spared all the fanfare for Win95. Not sure if the 3.1 version in the installers does.
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rusk ◴[17 Nov 24 21:15 UTC] No.42167345[source]▶
Windows 3.1 was just a graphical shell. All the drivers and stuff were still managed by DOS. You still needed to configure your system with config.sys

EDIT it’s coming back to me. Windows 3.1 did have a a subsystem for running 32 bit apps called Win32 I think that’s what you mean. This was very much in the application space though.

It still used cooperative multitasking and Win 95 introduced preemptive.

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YakBizzarro ◴[17 Nov 24 21:38 UTC] No.42167548[source]▶
It was Win32s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s
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1. int_19h ◴[20 Nov 24 00:38 UTC] No.42189655[source]▶
Much later, the HX DOS Extender (https://www.japheth.de/HX.html) had something vaguely similar called Win32 emulation mode. Meaning that you could load a Win32 PE image, and it could call quite a few Win32 APIs, all while running under plain DOS (in 32-bit flat mode), with HX DOS providing the implementation.

It had just enough parts of the API implemented to be able to run Quake 2 in DOS.