Microsoft® Windows® XP Unleashed

A Brief History of the Windows Registry

Before there was the Registry, Microsoft operating systems used simple text files to control system settings. In the early days of MS-DOS, configuration of the operating system was controlled using the following two files:

• Config.sys contained configuration information required by MS-DOS to operate. This information was mostly general settings for hardware that multiple applications would use, such as how low and high memory was handled.

• Autoexec.bat was a batch file used to automatically execute startup procedures when MS-DOS was finished loading.

For the most part, MS-DOS–based applications were in charge of all their own configuration settings, including how they used hardware devices shared with other ...