Re: [Freedos-user] Windows 3.1 in Freedos

[dmccunney <den...@gm...>]

On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 6:50 PM,  <mce...@us...> wrote:
> On 1/5/14, dmccunney <den...@gm...> wrote:
>> On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 3:55 PM, James Crawford <jr...@em...> wrote:
>>>
>>> I tried running Windows 3.1 with all the memory driver choices that are
>>> available at startup and none of them worked.  Is there another driver
>>> available that will work with Windows 3.1?
>>
>> Out of curiosity, what happens if you try running Win 3.1 *without* a
>> memory manager?  (Just load HIMEM.SYS to provide XMS,)
>>
>> Once loaded, Windows did its own memory management, and I don't think
>> it necessarily needs EMM386 or the like.  It' been decades, and memory
>> may be failing me.)
>
> Dennis' memory is just fine.  Windows 3.1 only needs an extended
> memory manager (such as HIMEM.SYS), it does not use expanded memory
> for either, standard or enhanced modes.  However, it was always common
> practice to use the expanded memory manager (EMM386.EXE) with the
> NOEMS switch in order to provide upper memory blocks (any RAM in the
> 640-1024KB range that is not used by the system BIOS) to load the real
> mode DOS drivers, such as the CD-ROM driver and MSCDEX.EXE, in upper
> memory to save conventional RAM (below 640KB) for DOS programs.

Ah, thanks.  Nice to have confirmation.

I used Win 3.1 extensively back when, but with a twist.

I had a Unix machine (an AT&T 3b1, sibling to the AT&T UNIX-PC) at
home before I had a PC.  When I got a PC running MS-DOS, I spent some
time and effort making it Unix-like.  There were lots of DOS versions
of common Unix utilities, but the key in my efforts was buying the
commercial MKS Toolkit.  MKS was a Canadian engineering firm that
originally created the Toolkit for internal use, but decided it might
have broader interest.  It became "The Tail That Wagged the Dog", and
became their main business.

The MKS Toolkit included pretty much every Unix command that made
sense in a single-user, single tasking environment, including complete
versions of the vi editor and the the Korn shell.  I swooned.  When
you installed the Toolkit in full Unix compatibility mode, it replaced
COMMAND.COM as the boot shell with INIT.EXE.  Boot the system,
CONFIG.SYS was processed, and INIT ran, putting a Login: prompt on the
screen.  Enter a userid and optional password, and those were passed
to LOGIN.  LOGIN looked at a Unix compatible /etc/password file, and
if it found a match for the ID, changed to whatever was specified as
that ID's home directory, and ran whatever was specified as the IDs
shell.  Exit the loaded shell, and INIT was reloaded and you began
over.

I had IDs to run the MKS Korn shell (and in the Korn shell, you had to
dig to discover you *weren't* on a Unix machine,) 4DOS, DesqView, and
vanilla COMMAND.COM.  I could switch environments without rebooting.
Just log off and back on with a different ID.

When I migrated to a 386 machine and ran Win 3.1, I kept the Toolkit
in the loop.  As far as Windows was concerned, the SHELL was Program
Manager (the equivalent of Windows Explorer in current versions.)  But
you could change that in the SYSTEM.INI file.  A number of third-party
Program Manager replacement existed, and I played with them.  So my
Toolkit /etc/passwd file had entries for different ones, and logging
in with the appropriate ID copied a customized version of SYSTEM.INI
over the default, and Windows loaded using the preferred shell.  I
spent most time in Workplace Shell for Windows, and IBM employee
written freeware product that tried to reproduce the OS/2 Workplace
Shell environment.  WPS for Win already had things like icons on the
desktop and no Program Manager limitations on the number of program
groups you could have.  It had the fringe benefit that migrating to
Win95 was trivial for my SO, because most of the changes in interface
Win95 brought she was used to from WPS for Win.

And because Windows ran as an application on top of DOS, the Toolkit
let me choose not to run it, and I could launch a standard command
line interface and run the Toolkit, 4DOS, or DV instead.

Win98 made that approach unworkable, and I used Cygwin to get a
Unix-like environment, but it was wonderful while it lasted.
______
Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519