VOTW: Every Major Windows Upgrade On Video

I've been thinking about installing Windows 95 on my SSD, just for the fun of it. :-) The whole operating system is like 150-200 MB in size when installed, and my SSD averages on about 150MB per second in readspeed...

OMG this is freaking awesome... epic sweet experiment. Too bad about the color settings not carrying over after XP, they just don't make em like they used to, lol. I'm amazed at just how many legacy programs survived the trip all the way to Windows 7, very impressive.

rofl good stuff

Awesome Work, Brings back some happy and not so happy memories

Really good experiment enjoyed watching it.

He's 28? I am 30 and i was just a kid using windows 3.1. So he he must of teething on the keyboard for windows 1.0

Not bad but they left a few Win OSs out. Win ME, Win NT 3.51, and Win NT 4.0. I find it strange since they bothered to go from Win 98 to Win 98 SE. But I must say it was kinda fun to see those old OSs again. Although I'm not sure why the installs took so long. I don't think it has ever taken me longer than 35-45 min to install any version of Win. Then again I have always made it a practice to format and install fresh vs upgrading because I have always run into issues with using the upgrade option.

Really wish that pages like Engadget would stop being negative towards windows as they even had a negative comment for this article. Respect to Toms for staying impartial.

Either way, loved the video and it obviously brought back memories.

Here's another great video that seems to have escaped
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHkPiU9YAQk

the difference between 98 and 98se is so vast they could have made a new os out of it. at least if i remember right.

Nice memory lane trip. Still have a laptop running 3.1 that has to be launched from DOS. The infamous 98 install screen. That black bar / blue window on the installer still haunts my dreams, especially since 98 had a tendency to self destruct itself and need to be reinstalled every few months.

I agree with skipping ME and NT since those never were popular. My own usage path was 3.1->95->98 SE->2000 (dual booted with 98 so I used 98 most of the time)-> XP SP2 -> XP SP3 -> Vista -> XP SP3 -> XP SP3 / Win 7 dualboot but SP3 still most of the time.

My usage path was 3.0->3.11->95a->95b->98->98SE->ME->98SE->2000+SP->XP->XPSP1->2->3->Vista->XPSP3->W7x64. :-)Millenium was thrown out after the first time I attempted a reboot. The one right after the installation, you know? BSoD! And back to 98SE it was! :-D

Why didn't he say how long it takes to install Windows 7? As I remember it's very quick, under 30 minutes or so. What a jerk!

usage for me was:
Doss with Moo Menu, win3.11, 98, 2000/98SE dual boot (my first computer), XPsp1, XPsp2, XP64bit, briefly back down to XPsp3, back up to XP64bit when some hardware drivers were fixed, Win7 RC1, Win7 Home 64bit, and am now itching for win8RC but I guess it is going to take a while.
I remember after a few years of 98 having to go back and fix a win3.11 computer and being so frustrated at the lack of context menus, or much of anything else for that matter, but I don't remember being frustrated by it when it was all I knew. Same with win7 vs XP. I went for about 2 years on win7RC/Home and now have to use XP at work and it is really frustrating.
Win2K and win7 are my favorites so far.

Ah Good Ol' Monkey Island! I loved that game

I went from Win95, Win98, Win98 SE (my first pc, Compaq Presario 7470), WinXP Home, WinXP Pro SP1-3, WinXP Pro 64-bit SP2, Win Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP2, Win 7 Pro 64-bit RTM-SP1.

Never got into DOS so much and I had friends with Win 3.11 but the first computers I played around with had the familiar GUIs. Vista worked great for me SP2 on rocking hardware, so I don't have the bitter hatred others do for it. Then again I didn't upgrade to it until my old 32-bit XP Pro machine died well into Vista's lifecycle and I got it on student discount.

I remember how great XP was for networking when it first came out. The reboots from 98SE drove me nuts when I had to change things up.

That was awesome...good job

Started puting when you had to plug the patch cords in on the back of the machine to do your programming.

Linux rules.
It's like the logo "have it your way."

@ 4:04 - 4:06 LOL, I guess I'm not the only one that puts in BS terms in username and company fields

Ah the memories... As a demonstration to a class I taught about a particular shipping software program, I put 2 computers side by side. One installed Win95 and the other installed the shipping software... hehe the race was on. Of course Win95 won every time so the recruits learned don't stay on the phone waiting for an install... get another call

Pretty cool... BUT I wish they would have done this on a physical machine from the 90's rather than VMware. The biggest problem for all of the Windows upgrade paths has been the physical hardware requirements. There's no way this straight upgrade path could have been done on a machine back in the early 90's. So maybe on a another try, try a new machine (not on on VMware) and start from MS DOS an up. I'd like to see the benchmarks, hard disk space usage and bootup times.

WMware is made to "emulate" a generic PC. That's why they used it. If they were to use a PC from the '90s like you said, XP would have to be heavily trimmed and customized to run on less than 128 MB RAM and Vista probably wouldn't even boot, let alone Windows 7...

Regretablely, Win7 removed the support of classic Start Menu, and that stops me from upgrading

Older Windows will crash on systems that have the minimum amount of memory for XP. Just to get Win98 running on a system with 1GB you have to edit system.ini to limit the apparent memory to 512MB or less.

20yrs of backward compatibility! Amazing.

Something Linux could never ever have.

interesting

That was a good video

windows haters can your OS do that? (although I do use Fedora too)

While they are all named Windows, there are in fact two distinct OS lines that have been developed at Microsoft. Windows 1.0 through 3.11 were never really OSes in the first place - these were graphical DOS shells. Windows 95 finally merged DOS with Windows into a cohesive OS, along with all the deficiencies of the by then venerable 16-bit DOS (the Windows kernel was in fact partly 16-bit, partly 32-bit). This OS line continued through to Windows ME. Considering the progression from Windows 1.0-3.11 line, the choice of Windows 2000 as the stepping upgrade to Windows XP is extremely odd - that OS belongs to the completely unrelated Windows NT OS line. This consumer Windows OS line was thankfully finally terminated with the Windows ME release. Enter Microsoft's premier business OS line - Windows NT. Initially released as version NT 3.1 in 1993, it progresses through NT 3.5, NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 (NT 5.0). Finally, Windows XP (NT 5.1) merges the consumer-oriented features of Windows ME thus finally signing the death sentence for the DOS/Windows line. We've since witnessed Windows Vista (NT 6.0) and Windows 7 (NT 6.1). To keep things interesting, Microsoft actually spun a new OS line after Windows XP - for server installations (it's been in existence since early Windows NT really, but with Windows XP came the divorce in names). We've had Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 released so far (with Windows Server 2011 coming soon).

Observant readers might have noticed a development cycle in Windows NT OSes somewhat reminiscent of Intel's tick-tock cycle of architecture changes and die shrinks. In Microsoft's case these are major feature development and polishing. Unsurprisingly, the major feature releases aren't popular and considered by the mass public as flops - Windows 2000, Windows Vista. In contrast, the minor version releases (Windows XP, Windows 7) have become very popular. If Microsoft keeps this development philosophy (I hope they don't...), the next consumer version of Windows is bound to be another public disappointment.

I was thinking of installing my version of Win98Se, but it seems that I'm going to have difficulties finding all the necessary programs, like winzip won't open any more modern compressed files, the browser will be limited to FireFox 2.20 (unless you want the very old IE6).
I think if it wasn't for firefox win95 and nt, and anything before that won't be able to go online!

+1 and the general arrogance of not allowing you to change anything to how you want it.

I like your post agnickolov! If we shall confuse things a little more we also have the 64bit versions of Windows XP. The WinXP x64 is based on Windows 2003 Server x64 but is pretty much the same as WinXP professional.
When it comes to Microsoft's new iteration it probably is likely to be a flop, at least initially, even Steve Ballmer has admitted that the Windows 8 is a very risky project. My suspicions are that they are going to try to conceive an OS that is tightly integrated with an AppStore like entity very much like the package managers in Linux but with software that you pay for and an integrated online based license management. I believe that their ultimate intention is that software such as MS Office, Adobe Creative Suite, 3DStudio, Steinberg Cubase, Autodesk AutoCAD/Inventor/Solidworks/..., Catia etc are to be sold and distributed through their "AppStore" where licenses, bug reports and updates are managed. They might also lean towards something cloudish with their "Microsoft Azure" framework but I don't think the customer base will be ready for such a thing during the next 5-10 years. To provide e.g. video editing software as a cloud based service requires an infrastructure with a level of reliability that is not likely to be achieved anytime soon.