|
DOS is not MS-DOS. Your terminology sucks rocks. MS-DOS was an OS (albeit a poor one, not reentrant). An OS has, among other things, an executive and a user interface. The core of the executive was command.com. It had a number of internal commands. If a command did not match an internal command, it had the ability to search the path for an executable file with a name matching that of the command. Executable files were .com, .bat (shell, but poor), and later, .exe. The user interface was text-based (what you would now call "console").
When Windows was introduced it was just a graphical user interface running under MS-DOS; again, it was a poor one. With the introduction of Windows 95 the first step was made to divorce the executive from MS-DOS. With Windows 98 the divorce was essentially final. MS-DOS, more specifically, command.com and cmd.exe, became tools of the executive, and not the core of the executive. The majority of the booting of the system involves the loading of drivers, the configuration, and other necessary features. This process is NOT conducted by MS-DOS. The user-interface is intended to be primarily GUI. The "console" interface became just a text window running as part of the GUI. "Booting into DOS" with a working Windows installation is essentially booting into a single text window with no additional windows, and without the desktop, which is really just a separate full-screen window. True booting into what you call "DOS" actually happens if one boots into the Recovery Console. It just isn't MS-DOS.
|