However, it is not true that Windows Millennium Edition only contained the Windows 2000 user interface and restricted access to the "Command Prompt Only" option.
In Windows 95 OSR 2.1, the USB supplement provided WDM itself as well as the USB drivers, and the first version of Windows 98 contained WDM drivers for numerous devices. Already, Win32s was in development, which would provide a great deal of binary compatibility between the two operating systems, since they now both shared the Win32 API.Īlso, the first release of Windows 95 had even more Win32 functions built in, such as preemptive multitasking of 32-bit applications, and was largely compared to Windows NT 3.5 during development and Windows NT 3.51 when it was first released.Īnother major development was NTKERN (later Win32 Driver Model), which would similarly provide binary compatibility for drivers between the Windows 95 and future versions of Windows NT. It is also worth noting that even as far back as 1992, Microsoft was already quite well into the process of unifying the two operating systems together. The plan was always to migrate the 9x users to NT, it just took a bit longer than first thought. Not least, they added SoundBlaster emulation to NTDVM, meaning at last DOS games could run under the NT kernel with sound - and without relying on third-party addons. MS did a lot of work in XP to make it more home friendly, what with the UI changes, the lopping off of enterprise features (domain support, console snap-ins) and so on. ME also made it harder to access real-mode DOS on startup (something you could do with BootGUI=0 on 9x) and the line at the time was that it was there to encourage people to start moving away from DOS.
and that it'd be better to port the Windows 2000 UI to the 9x codebase instead (which led to the abortion that was ME). Indeed, if you'd sent off to Microsoft for the (free) Windows 2000 evaluation folder back in the day, you'd have ended up with copies of Windows 2000 Pro, Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Advanced Server - but no home edition, nor any mention of such.īefore the release of Windows 2000 PC Plus magazine in the UK mentioned that there were originally plans to release a home user version, but due to the reliance on DOS games at the time in the home market it was felt that NTVDM wasn't up to the task just yet.
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