Comment by xenadu02
3 years ago
The AARD code (which was a non-fatal warning that didn't stop you from using Windows) never actually shipped. It was patched to be non-reachable in the final release, probably a binary patch to avoid a regression and long build times (including a large packing problem: optimizing floppy disk layout)
FWIW DR-DOS was a dead end product at launch. It was abundantly clear to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that people/OEMs were not going to buy two operating systems: a GUI OS and a DOS that also acted like a bootloader for the GUI OS.
The idea that there would exist, for any significant length of time, a market for a standalone text-only 16-bit DOS was complete and utter fantasy. DR-DOS was never significant in terms of sales. Even if the AARD code had actually shipped in the final Windows 3.x release it wouldn't have mattered.
DR-DOS was a viable product for many years.
It first appeared as a product to compete with MS/PC-DOS 3.x releases in the late 1980s. XT-class machines were still on the market, and Windows was far from unchallenged dominance. If you asked in 1989 what computing would look like by 1995, "OS/2", "Unix", or "something we haven't even imagined yet" were viable guesses, probably even more so than "That clunky Windows/386 shell will subsume almost all drivers and functionality, but you'll still need a glorified version of DOS 3.3 as a bootloader."
Aside from whether DR-DOS was a compelling retail product, it served an important market purpose: it forced a price ceiling for MS-DOS. This probably spurred Microsoft's questionably-legal bundling and pricing strategy, but the end result is that OEMs weren't paying $150 for a copy of DOS through the 1990s.
You make some fair points. My main point is this:
Stop posting the AARD code thing as some kind of "gotcha!". AARD is irrelevant. If you want to point at anti-competitive or problematic things Microsoft did then point at things that actually mattered.