Watch as a modern PC gets Windows 1.0 installed, and upgraded through every major version up to Windows 7. Not sure what’s more amazing; that this screencast is possible today in a VMware virtual machine, or that applications installed in Windows 3.1 still worked through every upgrade to Windows 7, representing nearly 20 years of compatibility. (via kottke)
7 Comments
Alan Ralph
Hi Gina. I watched that video the other day. I can remember using Windows 2/386 a bit back in 1989/90 during a work placement that was part of my university CS degree course. Windows 3.0 showed up on some brand new i486-based computers shortly before I finished there.
I actually did the Window 3.1 -> 95 -> 98 upgrade path for real, on the (almost) same PC – admittedly, the motherboard and CPU were replaced a few times during that period (i486sx/25, i486dx2/66, Pentium/166). Sadly that PC went to recycling by the time I eventually moved to Windows 2000 (MSDN subscription ftw!)
Since then, my computers have all been fresh OS installs or wipe-and-replace.
Richard Koffler
This is great. Thanks for sharing.
Graham Porter
Has anyone tried the same experiment with the Mac OS lineage?
I suspect it wouldn’t work given that Apple is primarely in the business of selling hardware.
Tony Burkhart
That is great to watch and reminisce. I arrived to the computing world on Mac OS8 first. I subsequently used Windows 95 and up and Mac OS9 and up… but this is the first time I’ve seen any of the DOS or 2.X installs. Good find, thanks for the share!
Robert Bigelow
The first PC I ever owned was a Dell pizza box running MS-DOS 6.22 and the command intepreter had enough in common with that of my Unix terminal at work that I rather enjoyed the experience.
Khurram Ali
cool! I did work on dos back in 89, then in windows 3.1, never looked back since then.
Sylvain Trudel
Thank you for sharing. I lived all those versions. I also used windows 3 on a Sun 386i and a Win 2000 on a SGI …
:-strudel