Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!b.gp.cs.cmu.edu!Ralf.Brown@B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU
From: Ralf.Brown@B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: .COM and .EXE files
Message-ID: <254affed@ralf>
Date: 29 Oct 89 12:49:33 GMT
Sender: ralf@b.gp.cs.cmu.edu
Organization: Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science
Lines: 23
In-Reply-To: <254A1EE4.6157@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca>

In article <254A1EE4.6157@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca>, cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Stephen M. Dunn) wrote:
 >   The loader in COMMAND.COM (which stays resident once you've run
 >COMMAND.COM/P) loads all .EXEs and may load .COMs, too (I'm not sure
 >on that count, since all you have to do for them is load them straight
 >from disk to memory).  This is the case for DOS versions prior to 4.
 >In DOS 4, they must have migrated the loader down one step into DOS,
 >as you can install .EXEs from the config.sys file, which you could not
 >do previously.

Not true.  The loader was in a second transient portion of COMMAND.COM in
PC-DOS 2.x *only*.  It is a resident part of IBMDOS.COM (or MSDOS.SYS) in
MS-DOS 2.x and both MS-DOS and PC-DOS 3.x.  The loader loads both .EXE and
.COM.  (For what it's worth, the loader was in the COMMAND.COM transient
portion in DOS 1.x)

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