You are "rebooting" Windows, only to the extent that the word "reboot" has
been redefined (actually I think MS say "restart Windows", which is more
accurate, so for once it's not them hijacking jargon to mean what they feel
like). Windows 95 is barely more of an OS than Windows 3.x was - it's just
that there is more stuff done by 32-bit drivers and not many calls back to
services provided from real mode. But Windows 95 isn't really in control of
the machine - it's just a huge complex DOS extender with a GUI.
In fact you can start Windows 95 (or rather, DOS 7.0) in text-only mode,
quite trivially by hacking a line or two in the file called (!) MSDOS.SYS.
In fact, it's a text-mode operating system with an optional graphical window
environment running on top of it. Hmmm, where have I seen that before ?...
(This is not a trivial analogy. If an average user has an X server problem,
s/he can restart X without rebooting Linux, and this is not far off what
happens when you "restart" Windows 95. DOS 7 doesn't provide the kind of
fast reboot we're trying to propose here.)
Nick Brown, Strasbourg, France (Nick(dot)Brown(at)coe(dot)int)
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