Comment by TacticalCoder
7 hours ago
> DOS didn't have certain protections because the hardware it targeted did not have those protections. For UNIX on the same machines, they also had no such protections. On 8086 there were no CPU rings, no virtual memory and no other features to help there.
Those arrived with the 386 (286? Don't remember but 386 for sure) and DOS was well alive late into the 386 and even late in the 486 days.
> For UNIX on the same machines, they also had no such protections.
I was already running Linux on my 486 before Windows 95 arrived. Linux and DOS. One had those protections, the other didn't.
I agree that DOS was offered well past when it should have been, but there were alternatives even in the 1980s - Netware, OS/2, commercial UNIX like XENIX and SCO.
Windows 95 was still based on DOS, and didn't offer a lot in the way of isolation or other security features. Win98 and ME were similar. It wasn't until all Windows versions used the NT kernel (XP being the first consumer-focused release) that this changed.
I mean, why would Microsoft program said protections into DOS when NT existed by 93?
Simply put there was no putting said protections in to DOS for a few reasons. Backwards compatibility being a huge one. That and memory in most computers was tiny, getting Linux running on most of them would have been difficult.