[timonoko]

I cant find the history of Loadlin. When did it came out? It seemed to be the gateway from MSDOS to Linux Shell. If you had no experience with Windowing systems, or just shitty machine, you slowly turned into Linuxer without paying much attention to details.

[zozbot234]

Early Linux versions also provided UMSDOS, which implemented a standard Linux filesystem in a subdirectory on a FAT drive. So you could keep your Linux install under e.g. C:\LINUX\ and boot it via LOADLIN.EXE. It wasn't quite seamless, because there was no way to exit back to DOS other than a reboot. But generally it worked quite well.