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DOS still exists because some of the very old but still useful products only run with DOS so it would be silly to destroy it. The way that I understand it DOS still exists because of how memory still is allowcated with the "infamous" 640K barrier. Despite the amount of memory computers have, up to Windows XP memory was still based on the same structure that was in the first PC which had a mb of ram. A lot of log jams in memory occur while the programs are trying to page through this small section of memory. Another reason is to allow 16 bit programs, in particular, to run under Windows OSes though XP.

I do not know if this structure persists in Windows-64 (64 bit Windows) or Windows Vista. It was my understanding that the next version of OS was going to eliminate both the backward compatibility and 640K barrier.

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17y ago

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