The little-known winstart.bat batch file

The architecture the DOS-based windows line, and particularly the versions that had the virtual machine manager and ran in 32-bit protected mode, is such an interesting crufty archaeological dig. The OS's are bristling with hacks to make things work in resource-constrained environments, all while having ridiculous amounts of compatibility. There's a certain perverse elegance in it.

NT, being a "real" OS (with memory protection, kernel/user separation, access control, etc), seems so much more obvious (and boring) in its design compared to the earlier DOS-based Windows series. The "adults" came in and showed the kids how to make a grown-up operating system.

I don't miss the instability of the older DOS-based Windows OS's, for sure. I wouldn't want to go back there. For their time, though, they really did punch above their weight.

Edit: I didn't mean "adults" in any negative sense. I think MSFT took advantage of an opportunity for some very senior and opinionated talent.

We booted an operating system and then booted another operating system around it, so that the original operating system was now running inside a virtual machine controlled by the second operating system.

Decades later, this was again brought to attention by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperjacking and subsequently Microsoft themselves "reinvented" the concept as a Windows feature: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...

Nice little metaphor in the footnote, there:

>>> Think about that: We booted an operating system and then booted another operating system around it, so that the original operating system was now running inside a virtual machine controlled by the second operating system. It’s like leaving your house, walking down the street, and halfway down the block, realizing that you’re now walking inside a movie studio set.

Here’s hoping that we’ll have the technology to digitize human brains before Raymond Chen dies.

Always enjoy a Raymond Chen article

What the heck are "TSR"s? Is this common knowledge?

It's funny how Windows 9x (and the 386-enhanced versions of 3.x) used "VM" to refer to DOS specifically. The legacy of real mode software was so towering even back then that Intel had to build a mode to virtualize those apps specifically, despite x86 not being able to virtualize protected mode kernels until decades later. In what other CPU architecture do you get such specific amount of privilege isolation?

Pictures are worth a thousand words, and oh man those diagrams. I could have used them back then!

WINSTART.BAT is just "AUTOEXEC.BAT for Windows"

The extra diagrams to state how it all works were extra.