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Running DOS Apps on Windows from 1.0 to 95 (2020)

 gekk.info « articles It's well documented that a great selling point of Windows throughout all its early editions (up to at least 95) was the ability to run DOS applications, and specifically to run multiple at once. Most of us have probably done this at some point, unless you're young enough that the first Windows you ever used was 64-bit, where they removed DOS functionality.

Windows 95 will no longer run on an EGA card like previous editions, but it is very much at home on VGA - that's what's listed in the system requirements, all the screen metrics are very comfortable at that resolution, and all the icons are designed to look great in 16 colors. That is to say, a PIF for Dbase.exe under Windows 3.1 would apply to any program with the name Dbase.exe, anywhere on the system or on removable media, so if it specified an initial directory on the C drive, a copy of the app launched from floppy would start in that folder - an inflexible approach. I suspect this is because Microsoft had by this time built new functionality into the underlying DOS in order to make things Just Work better for most apps, and not tested it against extremely old software like this, figuring it was pretty reasonable at this point to say "just get a new version, that program's 12 years old."

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