Re: Seeing VERSIONINFO under Vista?
4GB file limit was because FAT16 could only handle that much (actually up to
2GB partition?). Therefore, it didn't make business sense to convert VFAT to
64 file pointer. At that time, maximum consumer disk drive was around 1 GB.
I bought one gig in 1995 (WD) for 300. Though capacities were growing fast,
thus FAT32 was introduced.
GDI/USER were pretty much reused from Win3.1, although expanded a little bit
with TextOutW and a few other unicode-aware text functions. All that was
connected through a great kludge of thunks. I don't remember if Win95
required FPU, probably not. NT GDI was using FP coordinate translation code,
and it was much bigger that Windows 3.1.
As said, it's possible to make a candy from shit, but it will be a candy
made of shit. Win95 was the right solution to fill the gap. But it was a
candy made of shit. As much as IBM PC.
"Joseph M. Newcomer" <newcomer@flounder.com> wrote in message
news:trej531qneuiqf3rrmtltmgune1fvd8djr@4ax.com...
Under Win9x a 32-bit process uses 32-bit filehandling APIs that don't go
anywhere near the 16-bit code. 16-bit processes still call software
interrupt
21H to access the OS facilities, but the interrupt handlers are stubs that
forward to 32-bit code. There isn't really any of DOS doing anything.
****
And GDI coordinates were 16-bit; a listbox had a limit of 64K bytes of
resources to use
(including string storage space), all GDI resources were shared
system-wide, all USER
resources were shared system-wide, all kinds of controls had 16-bit limits
(e.g, a slider
control had a 16-bit range). I believe files had a 4GB limit because the
underlying file
system could not handle 64-bit file sizes (in other words, it was a
32-bit-size file
system, same as MS-DOS). This was because a lot of the original Win16
assembly code was
still being used.
\*****