alt Hacker NewsMS-DOS became obsolete only at the launch of Windows 95.
Until then, all the applications that could be found for Windows 3.0 or Windows 3.1 looked like worthless toys in comparison with the professional applications that were available for MS-DOS, despite the fact that the latter had to struggle with extended memory or expanded memory in order to use more than 640 kB of memory.
From 1990 to 1995, I had Windows 3.0, then 3.1, then 3.11 and I launched them from time to time, for fun, but to accomplish real work I always had to go back to MS-DOS.
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> MS-DOS became obsolete only at the launch of Windows 95.
Not even. The genius of Windows 95 was you could still run most of your DOS crap. (Maybe not games, but business apps.) Novell shops for example had a huge pile of DOS drivers and all that just worked underneath 95. DOS only faded away afterwards.
Aldus PageMaker is a toy for you ? I remember clearly it working on Windows 3.0
At first Windows 95 was not great for games, so at least through 1996-97 many games were still released for MS-DOS and often only for MS-DOS, or only had Windows ports later.
Looking back from now, I wish that era could have continued much longer, as running MS-DOS games in emulators is so much easier and more stable than to run old Windows games.