If you had asked me, I would have guessed that this wouldn’t be possible. One intrepid OS explorer has made a video wherein he not only installs every version of Windows since 1985’s Windows 1.0, but proceeds to upgrade from one to another. The video, titled Chain of Fools: an Exploration of Windows upgrade procedures, shows how DOS and Windows are installed in a VMWare VM, and how a couple of DOS games were installed to see how newer versions of Windows handle backward compatibility. Similarly, various customizations were made to the Windows preferences to see how they survived the upgrades. Video embedded after the break.
It was interesting to find all the legacy cruft lying around the hard drive even after the Windows 7 install that left fingerprints of previous Windows versions.
I tried to do the same recently, starting with Win3.1, but I got hung-up moving from 95 to 98.
This motivates me to try again. Now, if only I could find a copy of Windows 1.0, as well as super-early versions of DOS…
This guy skipped Windows 98 and went straight to Win2000.
Not having seen the video, that means he skipped NT 3.x/4.0 as well… sad, because going from Windows 3.11 to NT 3.x was my preferred route
Actually, he skipped Windows ME, which means he cheated
I think the proper route should’ve been 95/98/ME/XP, since NT and Win2k were not consumer flavors. If yer gonna start with workstations/business-class flavors, then you do NT 3.x/4.x/2000/XP Pro/etc.
Edited 2011-03-03 05:14 UTC
Well he did have a choice between 2000 or ME but he choose 2000 since chronologically it was next. But you’re right he should’ve choose ME since he wasn’t doing server flavors.
Meh. I went from 98 to 2000 at home. I always found 2000 to be extremely easy to use and setup. Maybe things were slightly simpler with the 9x lineage, but the fact that 2K just worked like it was supposed to went a long way.
Plus, all my DOS games worked in 2K, better than in XP in my experience. Odd that.
Same goes for me. I actually went from 98SE to 2000 in the year XP was released, and held off from XP until right before the release of SP2
win2k ruled as far as gaming was concerned… Only Win7 is more stable in my opinion.
Windows 2000 wasn’t just a server OS, it was also a workstation OS. In fact it was the first attempt at merging the home and server versions of Windows, the second attempt was XP.
What about NT4 ?
Win 2000 was released 2000-02-17
Win Me ( the last of the Dos based) was released a few months later 2000-06-19.
WinXp was the first attempt to merge the more stable NT line with the legacy dos based 9x line.
At least that, thats what I though you were trying to say. Win NT had always had a workstation version, from the very beginning.
ME was released after 2000, but it was built on the old 98 line, so afaik you couldn’t update between the two. He had the option of choosing 98->2000->XP or 98->ME->XP.
But yes, it would have been interesting to see him update through the early NT line. Maybe that’s cause for a sequel..
yes, it should be Win 95 – Win 98 – Win Me and Win 2K just for the fun of it
No, no he didnt. He skipped me and went to 2000.
So, just exactly where is this video? Do I have to boot into Windows to see it? Come on, you should have a link to the file so that I can see the video while running HAIKU.
It’s a youtube vid… so, you know how that works :/
We need a gnash thar really works in HAIKU. Off to Windows.
Cool. Once you get that working, could you port that working version of gnash back to linux?
(… says the former gnash hacker as he looks down and kicks the dirt ashamedly and mumbles to himself about f-king macromedia. )
If Haiku has Firefox, get the Video DownloadHelper add-on. You can download it from youtube and watch it in mplayer / vlc or whatever the hell runs on your silly OS
If is has FF 3.6+ one can use Conkeror’s media scraper, but I think that it may have been broken by recent YouTube obfuscations…t
There’s get_flash_videos, which is just perl…
Just for you, I changed the article to YouTube’s new embed code. You should get HTML% video now if you’re in their beta.
Now it crashes my browser (konqueror) you must change it to something else for me also (joking
)
Which WebPositive (Haiku’s webkit-based browser) doesn’t yet support
Hopefully once the media player supports streaming, that won’t be far behind.
HTML%, that sounds pretty advanced.
JOKE MODE OFF, PRAY WALK ON.
See http://www.youtube.com/embed/vPnehDhGa14
Does Haiku natively support WebM yet?
Obviously Haiku is nowhere near being an usable OS if it cannot display correctly a video (where is the BeOS legacy ?) /troll
Kochise
Not sure how that’s a reply to me, but ok..
It’s been usable for years, I would know, I have contributed to it. But all these FOSS operating systems need to share common goals – and one of those is RF media imo.
HAIKU can surely play the video. The problem is that there is no software yet that will stream the file. If I had a download link for the flash file, I could play it perfactly using VLC, but VLC won’t stream the file from a flash link.
Edited 2011-03-03 16:59 UTC
I have Haiku installed and am using it. I download YouTube videos using the “youtube-dl” script.
As for playing it, the excellent “MediaPlayer” Haiku application will play almost anything.
…on a mildly unrelated note, it seems like as soon as YouTube came out, people don’t want to watch a video unless it’s streaming. What’s up with that? People download and view photos and people download and listen to MP3 files. Is downloading and watching a video too old fashioned or something?
Edited 2011-03-03 17:11 UTC
Yes.
Well, the difference between downloading a video compared to a MP3 or a picture, is that the video might be fun watching ONCE and therefor the streaming is a better choice.
Second, a video is often heavier (in Kb/Mb/Gb) compared to a picture or a mp3.
Well, for the record H264/flv is saved to your hard drive while you’re watching it, then deleted from the cache when you leave the page on which it’s shown. It’s not actually ‘streamed’.
Flash has been crashing my browser fairly regularly for about a week, so I’ve taken to doing that manually. I should really script that…
The only reason this was possible is because it was done on a virtual machine. Windows 95 can’t handle today’s hardware – it won’t even start in Standard VGA mode!
The guy skipped Windows ME – the fastest Windows to start but also the fastest to crash on real hardware. I wonder if Windows ME would’ve had better luck on a virtual machine. He also skipped the mother of all bureaucracy… Windows NT 4.
Now, watching this video has motivated me to set up a virtual machine, not for installing older versions of Windows. I’m going to dust off my OS/2 Warp 3.0 retail box (on floppies!) and see if it installs.
I’ve had a good experience putting Warp 4.0 on VirtualBox, but it required a processor with virtualization extensions. My old Core2Duo was one of the very few Intel processors from that era that did not have the VT-X feature, but my current machine with an Athlon 64 X2 does.
You mean Pacifica (or AMD-V) but VT-x which is the name for the hardware virtualization technology from Intel.
Thank you, I couldn’t recall the name of AMD’s version. But yes, I meant my current AMD processor does have virtualization extensions, and OS/2, QNX and BSD under VirtualBox require it.
That’s actually one of the reasons my current processor (several years old) is an AMD one.
I’m not sure about now, but at the time, Intel had a love affair with WinVista-style “release a model for every combination of marks on the feature matrix so we can charge people for exactly what they need” product line design.
Hassle aside, I still don’t approve of that kind of behaviour.
I recall that there was a news regarding that intel was thinking another of that kind of product line. But still I prefer Intel over AMD (Please shall we cut off flamewar, since it is only my preference (: ) Anyway I wonder what happened to that..
That’s still the case. The product feature matrix for Intel CPUs is still several screens wide, and many screens high. It’s insane.
The AMD method is much simpler: only the amount of cache, number of cores, and frequency changes. All other features are the same (within a single processor family).
It’s very easy to figure out which Opteron, Phenom, Athlon64, or Sempron CPU you want.
I understand. It is a diverse universe with all sorts of confusing and complex namings!
Most people list it as SVM for AMD, as that’s the name of the feature in the BIOS (Secure Virtual Machine).
And VT for Intel.
Win ME was my favorite OS inside VMware. Light and fast to boot. Not that many crashes inside the VM.
Never seen it on real hardware though.
that was … 8 years from now.
Such a glaring admission makes me think he works for microsoft
Or, he has both halves of his brain.
I’m sure he wanted to avoid early baldness due to tearing out his hair.
Actually, as much as I hate Windows ME, it would’ve been a breeze for what this guy was doing: upgrade/install, check a few settings and previously-installed programs, and upgrade to something else. The nightmares came when trying to run this unstable, annoying and bloated disaster of an OS for an hour or more after getting it set up to run all your usual programs and hardware drivers… but running a quick test of an already-installed Doom II and Monkey Island before almost immediately upgrading wouldn’t have been too bad.
In fact, the two games–being already installed–removes one point of failure: the installer. Who knows, maybe the installer(s) would have crashed, but the games didn’t, leaving the OS actually looking better than it actually is.
[Okay, this part is sort of a joke, because I have unfortunately had the displeasure of owning a computer that came with Windows ME, and while it had some serious flaws with stability and bloat… its DOS and earlier Windows program compatibility was still quite good. Even though it got rid of–and I missed–rebooting into real-mode DOS.]
Needless to say though, I quickly and desperately “upgraded” this POS OS to the much better XP the first chance I got. Still bloated, still horribly insecure until SP2, still annoying with all the popups and tips and warnings that were introduced with Windows ME, but XP was much more stable for daily use. Well, except for SP1 or SP1a (can’t remember which), during which I had to keep the previous version installed and wait for the next service pack, since a bug with the network card driver caused an immediate BSOD when heavily stressing the card, usually with BitTorrent…
I would have liked to see him install native windows 95 applications and some windows 2000 applications to see if they still worked since Dos seems to have some of the easiest applications to emulate.
Word for Windows (from the Windows 3.1 era) and an early Windows game would have been interesting.
A fun video, thanks for posting it.
I don’t think one can really draw any conclusions from it regarding applications compatibility and display settings. After all, due to hardware incompatibilities and the system requirements of different Windows versions, the upgrade sequence shown here could not really occur in real life. It could only be implemented using a virtual machine environment — which didn’t become widely available until several years ago.
Actually, it could occur in real life.
The 9x and older lines were tolerant of hardware changes, unlike the NT line.
So, this is actually a plausible scenario…
Buy a Deskpro 386, install Windows 1.0 on it.
Install Windows 2.0 or 2.1/386 on it.
Install Windows 3.0 on it.
Install Windows 3.1 on it.
Decide it’s getting a bit long in the tooth, get a loaded Pentium box, XCOPY the entire hard drive over.
Install Windows 95 on it.
Install Windows 98 on it.
You know, a Pentium II would be nice… XCOPY is your friend again.
Install Windows 2000 on it.
Install Windows XP on it.
Damn, that’s slow. Stick a 1.4 Tualatin Celeron on a Slocket.
Now, this is getting into the absurd, but it’s still plausible…
Install Vista. (If your P2 system was sufficiently beefy to begin with, you can even upgrade it to the point where it’s “Vista Premium Ready”.)
Install Win7.
It wasn’t too difficult to move a Win2k from one system to another.
I started with Win2k on a Pentium 200MHz MMX, moved the drive to a dual celeron system I was borrowing, and when upgraded to an Athlon 750Mhz of my own, moved the drive again, all without reinstalling.
The secret is erasing HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Enum from the registry before you move the drive. Do that, Win2k re-detects all hardware at boot, and has no memory of missing hardware.
I would love to see it skipping from architectures, minor versions, major versions and all that
.
That sounds like a complicated ordeal.
I think just installing the old applications is a problem for the latest Mac OS X versions because it does not support the old architectures anymore ?
I started out my computing with Apple, so my fist experience with MS was rather late (DOS 6.0, Windows 3.1)
I read somewhere that Windows 1.0 defaulted to tiling rather than floating/stacking. Is this true?
If so, then Windows has gone backwards ever since. =P
For a modern 1600×1200 display, tiling is indeed a good idea for many people.
But try tiling on a 640×350 display, then report back with your findings.
Yes, it is true, as Apple was asserting patents over “overlapping windows”. Absurd, and eventually thrown out IIRC.
LOL! And someone still wonders why Windows still is the leader. And by far 😉
I would like to check the same stuff with other major OSes.
Such a feat should be possible with FreeBSD, but it would take forever to compile and not look nearly as pretty.
You’d have to wipe /etc and /var a few times.
Why compile it?
The Windows version did binary upgrades via install floppy/CD. You can do the exact same thing using the FreeBSD install CD for each version.
What won’t work, though, is binary compatibility for applications between versions. At least not automatically.
You’d have to manually install the needed misc/compat* port for the previous version(s) before you can run an already installed app.
Would be an interesting exercise, though. Any takers?
Hah, I didn’t even think about binary upgrades! I was thinking more along the lines of installing the first available FreeBSD, then pulling the source for the next major release, compile, mergemaster, and so on until 9-CURRENT. If I’m not mistaken (correct me if I’m wrong, I’m not on BSD at the moment), you can still compile COMPAT4x, which is over a decade of binary compatibility.
In addition to showing application compatibility, I think part of the exercise was to show how the GUI has changed over the past quarter century. With FreeBSD, or pretty much any UNIX, that depends on how often you change your window manager. Certainly people are still using heavily customized twm and fvwm setups even on quad core machines with whatever video card is top of the line supported (probably an nVidia).
Yeah, that’s the oldest compat port still in the tree, and the GENERIC kernel includes the COMPAT_FREEBSD4/5/6 options. So you could install FreeBSD 4.something, install an app via the ports tree, then do the upgrades. Manually installing the compat4x, compat5x, compat6x, and compat7x as needed.
Yeah, I guess showing the different terminal login screens for each version of FreeBSD wouldn’t be too exciting. Look, the version number changed … and that’s it.
I still wonder that every time I have to work on a Windows system, which is unfortunately pretty much every day.
Then you’re not fair to yourself 😉
True, working on Windows every day is being unfair to yourself but hey, it’s money in the pocket.
How Windows kept their users happy after 23 years with respect to application compatibility.
There are happy Windows users?
Does it means that at the end the VM will be running Win 7 on a FAT partition? or Windows offers to upgrade the partition type on some point?
I don’t remember if XP offered to “upgrade” the filesystem to NTFS automatically or not, but there was an option to run it manually after the OS was installed. Open a command prompt and run “convert /?”
Win 95 (optionally) converts FAT to FAT32. Win 2k converts FAT32 to NTFS.
Pretty sure Vista and above require NTFS to install.
Ha! Try that with ubuntu ! *ducks*
Try to do _anything_ with Ubugtu…
Debian.