“Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME also were all still siting “on top of DOS”. What exactly is your point? “
Before Win95 your machine started up in MS-DOS and you had to type in the command to start Windows 1, 2, 3.X.
That went away with Win95.
It booted Windows when you started your machine.
Probably what Signalman was getting at.
That is true, and personally I kind of liked it that way. In the days where system resources were much more limited than now there were lots of programs that ran much better in the DOS environment. Up until fairly recently I still had most of my machines setup to multi-boot meaning that I had them stop or pause and give me the choice as to what environment I wanted to boot into. With hardware as powerful as it has become it is now typically just easier to use virtual machines if you want to use a different operating system.
By the time Windows 3.11 came along probably 99% of users machines were already set up to go straight into Windows. Windows 95, although it brought some major improvements could still easily be set up to boot into DOS 7 if that is what your preference was. But by that time machines were becoming more capable, the operating system was getting better at ending processes that were tying up resources that were not being used and programs were being written to take advantage of Windows built in features. Photoshop was a good example... when version 2.5 was ported to run on PCs it needed Windows. And when Photoshop 4.0 was introduced it needed Windows 95.
Of course like many others caught in the hype of the day I put together a machine and purchased Windows 95 the day after it was released, and I loved it. But it is interesting how many software companies basically forced you to upgrade to Windows 95 if you wanted to continue using their products.
I wrote “macros” for Lotus 123 running under DOS 3.2. And this provides an example of why software companies utilized shortcuts provided by Windows in their products. Lotus 123 had a macro language that was very easy to use and much quicker to come up with a useful routine than using more traditional programming. And it was a vaguely like that with the shortcuts that Microsoft provided for software companies. They could let Microsoft handle most of the hardware related issues. But this also caused software companies to require their latest upgrades use the latest Microsoft OS release in some cases.
Sorry to get sidetracked.