🚀 go-pugleaf

Boba wrote:

> it makes me think that 32-bit Windows uses interrupts at least as much
> as any of the prev. ms oses.

It depends on the version of Windows. Put simply some of the interrupts
will be being used and some of them in the same way (keyboard for
instance) but from the programming POV it's completely different. WinNT
derived OSes (the proper 32-bit ones) sit on something called HAL
(Hardware Abstraction Layer) and this basically presents a fake
hardware layer for Win32. It's designed so that Microsoft (or whomever)
can create a custom HAL for their own hardware and just sit the OS
itself on top.

The 'DOS box' is actually a Windows console and when you are at the
prompt you are not in DOS, you are still in Windows. The magic bit is
that when you try to run a DOS program the console creates a VDM
(Virtual DOS Machine) to host it. Without getting too technical,
suffice to say that a VDM is basically a small PC emulator. It creates
a virtual DOS-like environment for the DOS application.

-- 
Andrue Cope [TeamB]
[Bicester, Uk]
http://info.borland.com/newsgroups/guide.html