Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!husc6!linus!mbunix!jcmorris
From: jcmorris@mitre-bedford.ARPA (Joseph C. Morris)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: MS Windows 2.x and 286 - what's the difference
Summary: Windows 2.1 == Windows/286
Message-ID: <41624@linus.UUCP>
Date: 7 Nov 88 23:50:03 GMT
References: <386@fauern.UUCP>
Sender: news@linus.UUCP
Reply-To: jcmorris@mbunix (Morris)
Organization: The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA.
Lines: 28

In article <386@fauern.UUCP> roderus@fauern.UUCP (Helmut Roderus) writes:
>
>   Does the 286 version run in protected mode of the 80286?
>   Does it support multitasking?
>   Will all MS Windows Applications run on this special version?

No, no, and supposedly.  The folks at usoft renamed the original Windows
product to Windows/286 when they released version 2.1 of the product,
probably to (1) parallel the name format of Windows/386, and (2) to reflect
the fact that Windows applications usually are s-l-o-w on an 8088-based
system.

As far as I can tell there are no 80286-only facilities; I've run it 
(more correctly, crawled it) on an original PC-1 using a gen-you-wine IBM
8088 chip.  Since it can't play the protect game, it isn't providing any
isolation between processes.

There isn't any indication that it can do anything significant that the older
Windows 2.03 couldn't do (although some bugs were cleaned up), so its 
multitasking support is no different from what we (didn't) have with earlier
versions.

No documetation I've seen indicates that there should be any problem using
applications which were designed for earlier versions in the 2.x range.
There are, however, problems with some applications which were designed
for the original Windows product since the 2.x (all subreleases) uses 
different file structures (such as font files).

Joe Morris