On: PowerMac 6100 Upgrade Guide (2000)

[twoodfin]

Windows 95 absolutely had memory protection and preemptive multitasking, at least for “native” Win32 applications.

System 7 had neither.

[musicale → twoodfin]

> Windows 95 absolutely had memory protection and preemptive multitasking, at least for “native” Win32 applications.

Apparently the first 1MB of RAM was mapped for compatibility with DOS and 16-bit Windows, which meant that the common bug of writing through a null/zero pointer could easily crash the system.

[tablespoon → twoodfin]

> Windows 95 absolutely had memory protection and preemptive multitasking, at least for “native” Win32 applications.

I know it had preemptive multitasking, but did it have memory protection? I didn't use Windows in that era, but my recollection is it didn't.

I do remember all the apologetics for cooperative multitasking, because that's what Macs were stuck with so it had to be justified.

[kevin_thibedeau → tablespoon]

Win32 processes were isolated. The problem is that certain kernel objects were limited and could be leaked leading to stability problems. Compatability with DOS required some regions of memory to be unprotected.

[bluedino → twoodfin]

Sort of... but enough bits of the system were still 16 but and it crashed every bit as much as the Mac