It must be true I read/heard it in the news!

[Brian Densmore]

Well yes and no. Yes there are a lot of features
added, but they are not anything new under the Sun.
These are things you didn't see in some of the stock
DOS manuals. Some of these things were there, but
undocumented. Some were utilities the M$ bought/stole
from other DOSes. M$ DOS isn't the only DOS in existence.
I used to run a 32 bit version of DOS that had all/most
of the capabilities of cmd.exe and command.com. What has happened
is M$ has added some utility programs that are accessible to this
new "shell". If you look at the actual code that lies underneath
it's still the old DOS code. Even Windows 286 (do you remember
Windows 286, I do) launched a "Virtual DOS Machine". Don't believe
everything M$ tells you about their technology. They are pathological
liars. NT wasn't a "complete" rewrite of Windows. There is DOS code in
there. Windows 9x still does one DOS hardware call. Windows 95 also 
took control of the hardware in the "DOS shell". I guess it really all
depends on how you want to define DOS. I define DOS based on the actual
codebase and not the functionality. The latest "cmd/command" shell
is no stranger to me, nor is more powerful than the last DOS version I 
ran. So I say cmd.exe or command.com whichever one you want to refer to
is not a far cry from old DOS. I may be a Linux guy, but I make my living
on Windows machines utilizing extensive "DOS" functionality, dating back
to 3.1 and NT 3.5. By the way you won't find cmd.exe stock on 98, but it
can be installed. I still find M$'s version of "DOS" lacking.

Tossing out another stone,
Brian

-----Original Message-----
> From: Garrett Goebel
>
> Let he who is without sin cast the first stone... 
> On Windows NT there are 2 command shells: CMD.EXE AND COMMAND.COM. 
> CMD.EXE is the NT native command shell and sports new features and
> syntax in each successive windows OS, and has worked under all
> supported architectures.  CMD.EXE is ***NOT*** DOS, or what is left of it. 
> No 16-bit virtual DOS machine is invoked when CMD.EXE is launched. 
> CMD.EXE is no more DOS than Bash is Linux.
> COMMAND.COM was the attempt at a DOS backward compatible shell. 
> If you started COMMAND.COM and checked the process list, you'd notice it ran
> inside the NTVDM process. NTVDM was the NT Virtual DOS Machine which provided
> backward support for 16-bit DOS programs so long as they didn't attempt direct
> access to hardware. ...