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Let's talk about the curious and ingenious DriveSpace, an MS-DOS program promising to double the available disk space. (raduzaharia.medium.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Exactly, here’s the canonical The Old New Thing post on the topic. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24063

tldr:
“MS-DOS served two purposes in Windows 95: It served as the boot loader. It acted as the 16-bit legacy device driver layer.”

“Among other things those drivers did was “suck the brains out of MS-DOS,” transfer all that state to the 32-bit file system manager, and then shut off MS-DOS.”