************************************* * * * DB/C Newsletter * * December 1994 * * * ************************************* Editor's Notes This month's article is a review of Windows 95. As we have previously communicated, DB/C 9 will not support MS-DOS 6.x (and before). DB/C 9 will only be available for Windows 95, OS/2, Mac OS, UNIX (and variants), and VMS. As the article explains, we believe that most 386, 486 and Pentium based PC's will be running Windows 95 within a year of its release. DB/C 9 will provide complete support for many of the new features in Windows 95. We will describe that support in a future newsletter. Again, there is nothing to report on finalization of the PL/B Standard. don.wills@swc.com Windows 95 Windows 95 is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. And a very important one. In its first year of release, Microsoft will probably sell 40,000,000 copies of Windows 95. That's a lot of software! Let's assume Microsoft will receive an average of $50 income for each copy. 50 times 40,000,000 is two billion dollars of revenue. That's a lot of money! (By the way, rumor has it that Microsoft is trying to get more than $50 for each new copy of Windows 95, but that Compaq, IBM, etc. are strongly resisting.) Why would so many people change their operating system in such a short period of time? Here are a few of the reasons: 1. Windows 3.1 has many limits, crashes a lot, and is a lot of trouble. 2. Windows 95 fixes most of the problems with Windows 3.1. 3. Windows 95 has many new features that people want. and most importantly, 4. Microsoft will advertise Windows 95 more than any other software product has ever been advertised. The single most important technical reason to convert to Windows 95 is the fact that it is a real 32 bit, protected mode operating system. This has two primary benefits. First, many application bugs can cause the entire Windows 3.1 system to freeze. A reboot is required. With a protected mode operating system, only the errant application terminates or freezes - it is impossible for an application to corrupt the operating system or any other applications. Even if the errant program freezes, it is still possible to switch to another application. CTL-ALT-DEL kills only the currently active application, not the entire system. This is useful to get rid of a program that freezes. In reality in Windows 95, serious program errors typically cause a protection violation, which pops up a dialog box informing the user that the application is being cleanly terminated. Second, a 32 bit environment provides for much better performance for many applications (including DB/C). Also, memory management program bugs are less likely to occur in a 32 bit environment. Many of the problems that are found with DOS character mode applications have to do with the memory managers used with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 (e.g. EMM386, QEMM, etc.). All of these add-ons to MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 are unnecessary in Windows 95. Windows 95 (Beta 2) has many useful new features. The following paragraphs describe some of these features. A new desktop (i.e. the user interface) replaces the old program manager. This desktop looks much more like the Macintosh user interface (which is far superior to the Windows 3.1 interface). A pulldown menu is included for starting applications. Desktop objects may be disks, files, or folders. The user can drag a desktop object to the 'Recycle Bin' to delete to object. (On the Macintosh the trashcan is called 'Trash'). The desktop may also contain objects called 'links' which are similar to the Macintosh alias mechanism. (Unfortunately, when a base object is renamed, a Windows 95 link is not updated and it then points to nothing. A Macintosh alias refers to the correct object even if the base object is moved and/or renamed.) All GUI controls have a 3-D look. This 3-D look is applied to all applications, even existing 16-bit ones (e.g. DB/C 8.0 for Windows 3.1). There are several new controls. A multi-column list box type control is very useful for browsing operations. The toolbar at the top of the window is now a standard control. The status bar at the bottom of a window is now a standard control. Previously, many applications provided these controls, but each did it slightly differently, thus defeating one of the best features of a GUI - common actions and look for ease of use and short learning time. Multi-page dialog boxes are now standard with tabs similar to page tabs on notebooks. A standard progress indicator control is included. The standard File Open and File Save dialog boxes are improved. 32 bit character mode applications are well supported - 32 bit DOS extenders are gone! Character mode applications can be started either from the character mode command interpreter (which looks just like the MS-DOS command interpreter), or they can be started from the GUI desktop, either by clicking on an icon, or from the Run... menu item. Another new feature is long file names. File names no longer need to be limited to 8.3 format. For backward compatibility, there are actually two names of each file, its 8.3 name and its full name. All commands and applications work using either name. New and improved Novell NetWare client software, written by Microsoft, is included with Windows 95. Novell network printer support is great. Each network printer can have a link on the desktop which, when clicked on, shows the status of the printer along with any jobs waiting in the print queue. Network login is built into the startup of Windows 95 - AUTOEXEC.BAT is gone! TCP/IP support is built into Windows 95. FTP and TELNET applications are included with Windows 95. Plug and Play is a major new feature of Windows 95. It will do away with many of the headaches of installing hardware into a PC. No longer will users need to know about IRQ levels, port addresses, DMA channels, etc. (Again, the Macintosh has had this feature for 7 years.) Another new feature of Windows 95 is OLE 2.0. (OLE stands for Object Linking and Embedding.) Although OLE is not very applicable to DB/C type applications, Microsoft will be strongly promoting it. OLE allows dissimilar software to work together using a document-centered approach, rather than an applications-centered approach. Document oriented applications such as word processing and spreadsheets will gain the most from OLE. We have worked with Beta 2 of Windows 95 for several weeks. It has been stable (no crashes) and performs well. By naming it Windows 95, Microsoft has committed to releasing it next year. Their current target date for shipping Windows 95 is the end of the second quarter. Whether or not they make the exact date isn't what is important - the fact that it will be put into use by many millions of people in 1995 is most important. DB/C Class Schedule The next DB/C class is scheduled for January 1995. Actual dates are not yet finalized. The class is held in the Oak Brook, Illinois office of Subject, Wills and Company. For more information, contact Judi Tamkevic via email at dbc@swc.com or via telephone at (708) 572-0240.