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Upgrading From Windows 1.0 To Windows 7
An anonymous reader writes "YouTube user Andrew Tait has uploaded a video titled Chain of Fools: Upgrading through every version of Windows. Tait starts with MS DOS 5.0 running Windows 1.0 and keeps upgrading the operating system until he reaches Windows 7, taking note of the changes to system settings and application compatibility along the way."
...this strikes me as someone who has too much time on his hands.
It would also be fun to difference the resulting file hierarchy with various clean installs. It would go to show how little effort goes into cleaning the mess that usually gets left behind by upgrades.
Kudos to Microsoft. And even greater kudos to VMWare.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Haha, how appropriate!
this has to be the most pathetic thing anyone has ever done... ever...
this is probably the most hardcore thing to waste the time of your life...
now excuse me need to catch up with some new makeup tutorials on youtube..
Not terribly interested in watching a video of OS upgrades (I get quite enough of that on my own) so a text write-up of the results would be dandy. Since the submitter didn't bother, perhaps it's time for an industrious reader to do a proper "review."
This is just a tour of the 9 hells. Why on Earth does there need to be a YOUTUBE video on it? This is a videography of pain and torment. Do not click. NSFW.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
should of also installed the video driver for higher res / more colors in 3.0 / 3.11 / 95 / 98.
...that Andy really needs to get a life!
Surely a masochist for putting his system through so many reboots!
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Man, this person is a confirmed hard core masochist! Arrrrgh! If he's married, my sympathies to his wire/partner! Whenever I run Windows, I cringe and run screaming back to my Linux systems. Unfortunately, there is ONE program that I have to use that ONLY runs on Windows, so I run it on an XP virtual machine on my Scientific Linux 6 (RHEL6) workstation, or my Ubuntu laptop when I'm on the road.
:-)
FWIW, we have something like 13 computers in our house, and not one of them runs MS software! My wife has a couple of Apple Mac Pro laptops, a Sony Vaio running Scientific Linux, and a netbook running Ubuntu. I have an 8 core workstation running SL6, a laptop running Ubuntu 9.04 and 10.10, an older workstation running Gentoo, an ever older 486 workstation running QNX 4.0, and two Nexus One Android phones. Then there is assorted other stuff (Palm Pilots, iPods, iPhones, etc). I guess you could call our house "Windowless"!
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
+1 Styx
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
HAHAHA! Wow, it doesn't take much these days to induce laughter. At least I WTFV
Interesting choice of username he selects for Windows 3.1
Current slashdot tags:
Recent Tags
* windows
* os
* upgrades
* technology
* microsoft
* software
* social
I'm tired of corporate propaganda!
7:35 - check out user name! Twatface. How can the guy be talking all serious with a label like that?
Without having seen the video I wonder what type of hardware is able to run all these versions of MS OS?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Should HAVE, dumbfuck, HAVE.
FWIW, we have something like 13 computers in our house, and not one of them runs MS software! My wife has a couple of Apple Mac Pro laptops, a Sony Vaio running Scientific Linux, and a netbook running Ubuntu. I have an 8 core workstation running SL6, a laptop running Ubuntu 9.04 and 10.10, an older workstation running Gentoo, an ever older 486 workstation running QNX 4.0, and two Nexus One Android phones. Then there is assorted other stuff (Palm Pilots, iPods, iPhones, etc). I guess you could call our house "Windowless"! :-)
Well... aren't you special..
disappointment with Windows 7 leads to incremental downgrades back to Windows 1.0
...to install every existing version of an obsolete operating system? Can anyone send him a current Linux CD please?
Where is Windows ME?
... to _finally_ settle on C:\users\ for the home directory? ... or to keep fucking around with batch/scripting: command.com, cmd.exe, VBScript, Windows Scripting Language, and Windows PowerShell ?
"Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." (Paraphrasing Edmund Burke, and quoting Henry Spencer who said it.)
At least Windows doesn't suck as bad is used to... now if they could only add Window Snapping when moving them around ...
PTSD...
-Apps/games installed on DOS 5 still work in Windows 7 unmodified after all the OS upgrade iterations.
-Various Windows setting survived 20 years or so in the same way.
To be fair, this is one of Windows strengths. It's not perfect but lets give credit where credit's due.
throw new NoSignatureException();
A guy shows how the upgrade procedure goes from DOS -> Windows 7, and instead of making comments on the robustness of the Windows upgrade system or anything even remotely related to the video, instead there are comments about how the poster doesn't use Windows anymore and brags about it.
Jeez, is there any wonder the Linux community is seen as toxic by outsiders?
I wish I could mod this up.
... the modern version.
Have gnu, will travel.
When I got divorced, my ex asked me to build her a computer. I obliged, and as a parting shot, told her I installed the latest-greatest operating system from Microsoft... hope you enjoyed ME, dear.
If the point is to end up at Windows 7, I would think after DOS, he would move onto *OS/2*, then NT 3.5, 4.0, 2K, XP, etc. OS/2 was intended to be the successor to DOS, whereas Windows 1.0 through 3.11 was just a shell that sat on top of DOS.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
It's documented in the urban dictionary, which makes it valid English, since English is not a dead language. Of course, that probably invalidates the urban dictionary definition, which leads to a confusing bit of circular logic.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=should%20of
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
mucking around with drivers in pre win ME had a pretty high mortality rate for the install, i don't blame him for leaving that out.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Ok! Now try it on a Mac: Take the latest Macbook Pro and install Mac OS 1 through OS 10.6.6.
I'll wait!
I started doing the same thing with Linux, every kernel version. It was a very long, boring video.
Thats doesn't seem accurate, sure DOS games were compatible but what about the myriad of Windows apps that perform OS level confirmations/checks/pre-quals before installing? That rules out (I would think) many medium to larger software titles. For example if you had a Windows 95 application I couldn't see him installing it on Windows 7 directly, he would have to have done it on Windows 98 and let it persist through upgrades. That to me isn't exactly backwards compatible.
Is this when I mention what version of emacs I am still running, without so much as a recompile?
/opt/xemacs/bin/xemacs /opt/xemacs/bin/xemacs -> xemacs-19.14 /opt/xemacs/bin/xemacs-19.14 /opt/xemacs/bin/xemacs-19.14
[~] machine:user# uname -a
SunOS machine 5.10 Generic_127127-11 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V240 Solaris
[~] machine:user# date
Thu Mar 3 18:50:46 EST 2011
[~] machine:user# ls -l
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root other 12 Jul 22 2010
[~] machine:user# ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bin bin 10107552 Sep 1 1996
[~] machine:user#
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I'm not trying to troll here, but it occurs to me that with two processor transitions (Motorolla 680x0 to PowerPC, and PowerPC to Intel), and various versions dropping support for older hardware for other reasons (i.e. the original version of the Mac OS X requiring a G3, and I'm pretty sure one of the releases of the classic OS had a problem with older version of the on-board ROMs), you couldn't do this with the Mac OS.
It's documented in the urban dictionary, which makes it valid English, since English is not a dead language.
Given that at least half of Urban Dictionary consists of made-up drivel written by scatological twelve-year-olds trying to out-gross each other, there's no way in *hell* I'm accepting everything I see there as legitimate English, living or not! >:-(
It was done in a VMWare setup, so the hardware wasn't really much of a factor. I think it would have been more interesting had it actually been done in a physical box, but it is what it is.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I am totally amazed that this was actually possible and that the system didn't break at some point. Every single time I've tried to upgrade from one Ubuntu version to the next, the system becomes unusable.
Sometimes I think Microsoft deserves more credit than nerds want to give them!
This.
And once he is at +5, we'll raise you to +5 just to get the point across.
And not a single fuck was given that day.
I take it only recently dawned on Andrew that maybe 640K wasn't enough for everybody?
#DeleteChrome
Sorry, dumbfuck is not a word.
Classic was only supported on PowerPC, and I think they dropped Classic support entirely in Snow Leopard.
you should of spent the mod points elsewhere
They should have gone from 98SE -> ME -> XP not 98SE -> win2k --> XP
"Living language" does not mean that everything that comes out of someone's mouth is correct. It's still possible to be wrong.
<sig> </sig>
Yeah, do it with versions of Unix. Bwa-hah-hah.
+1 grammar correction; -1 belligerence
And there the progression stopped. A lot of things just stopped working. So I recovered from a ghost of ME, tried again, same thing.
I never did get that particular upgrade to work. Dual-booted for awhile, eventually weaned off ME.
Methinks this is why he chose Win98 -> Win 2K -> XP. Avoids a lot of heartache.
My God, do you remember when we were actually looking forward to ME? Shudder.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Your link calls it a misspelling. Misspellings aren't correct grammar.
moox. for a new generation.
He does not install Windows 7.
Truth, Just Us, And Hatred For All Mankind!
What's in the (Win) box?
PAIN!
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
disappointment with Windows 7 leads to incremental downgrades back to Windows 1.0
I often wondered how many of the windows upgrades were undo-able. I seem to recall having seen that option in various other windows upgrade versions over the years; how many of them would work? Personally I'd be surprised if he even succeeded in downgrading all the way back to XP or 2k (assuming he didn't change his partition tables along the way)...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
umm A stupid way of saying "should have".. Urban dictionary points out that retards who don't know better use it that way. I could tell everyone that Surt eats dog shit for dinner but that doesn't make it food.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Should HAVE, dumbfuck, HAVE.
Dumb fuck, dumb fuck, DUMB FUCK.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to be fair, you should start with a 5-10MB disk, which is what was available around the time of Windows 1.0/DOS 5.
It would have been physically impossible to keep upgrading a machine this way in reality, as you'd have run into hardware driver issues when upgrading motherboards and hard drives to get the capacity needed for the newer releases of Windows. An interesting experiment to see if the software itself could deal with the upgrades, but hardly noteworthy. I'm more impressed with software like OS/2 that didn't need to be upgraded to serve it's purpose.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
you should of spent the mod points elsewhere
Should HAVE, dumbfuck, HAVE.
Should've. He just doesn't get apostrophies.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
He explains why he skipped ME, but doesn't mention 98SE
Good point, but you could of phrased it more politely. Try and be nicer next time. ;-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
windows 7.0 Good Performans. ..Thanks.
Solangul.Com Forum Türkiyenin En Kaliteli Forumlar
But, the new iOS won't support my 2 year old iPod...
In the beginning, there was null.
I like how they skip from 98 to 2000 to Xp. Where's the love, guys?
The video really highlights how "virgin" Windows installations are actually pretty solid. The real-world problems are typically third-party drivers and software.
Actually, what's interesting is that many of us were using Trumpet Winsock back in the day and the dude who developed it never got compensated for it:
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/fwciq/peter_tattam_created_trumpet_winsock_enabling/
Hey, you forgot about ME!
Interesting that he just goes to 2000 as the upgrade to 98 as opposed to ME and then XP.
Work Safe Porn
Upgrade from a 386 with Win3.1, to Win95 on 486DX, then Win98 a Pentium, Win2000 on Pentium II, etc. Try migrating your settings from one hard drive to another larger one at each step. Perform a few service pack upgrades along the way like a normal user would. Hint: Migrating your systems through multiple hardware & service pack upgrades is a pain in the ass and flaky as hell.
Just try to take an older windows version and copy the files and settings onto AN ALREADY INSTALLED OS that your hardware vendor gave you -- OS pre-installation will be the death of me.
You save time if you wipe the new system, copy the old files from one PC to the other, then use the OEM CD (IF YOU CAN) to "upgrade" the OS back to the newer version... I've had to buy an additional copy of windows (having paid for the one that's pre-installed) just to get a CD that would allow me to upgrade. That's the price you pay for being a loyal Microsoft customer...
Copying the old windows files over to the new larger drive won't copy the master boot record, and even if you do manage to reimage your new system to match the old system Windows will call you a THEIF (user of a pirated copy of windows), and prevent you from upgrading until you to re-validate since the massive hardware change. Good luck booting & revalidating, the old OS drivers don't work on the new system they've been copied over to... "Upgrades" are subject to having a "valid" installation of windows already on the machine.
To note: Another option worked sometimes -- Actually full on install the old OS into the freshly wiped new system. Then, copy all the files / settings, etc (or use migration tool if it exists & your old OS boots on the new machine...) Finally, "updrade" the new machine back to it's original OS version... Got a new machine?! Great! Stop right there, you can't use it till it has thrice installed windows!
Also: I dare you try using a 386 to run Vista.
So what if MS can be upgraded through "EVERY VERSION*" ON THE SAME VIRTUAL HARDWARE without monthly and/or service pack updates? This is a solution in search of a use-case that doesn't exist.
* Well, except ME -- Guess that it isn't possible to upgrade through "every version" then is it?
Old hardware won't run MS's new OSs, and the old OSs don't work on the new hardware (outside of a damn controlled environment VM -- Win3.1 on a x64 quad core? Don't make me laugh -- it won't even support my mouse). Of course using these old OSs for testing & supporting software for legacy systems is a useful ability, but come on...
Actually having lived & worked through the hell that is the upgrade path through multiple windows upgrades w/ data & software migration and different hardware, and then watching how easy it is in a VM is just maddening (Oooh, it COULD have been that easy!? Well, damn, then why wasn't it?! -- rhetorical question [no need for pedantic answers] )
Reality has been quite a bit more frustrating... Lesson learned: NEVER, I repeat NEVER use Windows (outside of a VM), and ALWAYS place your user files on a different drive and/or partition than the operating system -- It makes migration a hell of a lot easier.
Good grief I couldn't imagine watching that many installs/upgrades of Microsoft products at one sitting unless it was sped up considerably.
BTW: How many reboots were required (total) along the way?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Why would anyone do this? What possible use is there for his findings?
Sam has one liberty, which he sacrifices for one security. Can you tell me what Sam has now?
They should compare the very first blue-screen-of-death to the latest blue-screen-of-death.
Table-ized A.I.
Well I guess if you like paying for your software and are in need of compatibility, Windows gets a mod up...
Gives Mac vs PC fanboys something to argue over. Windows definitely beats Macs in that regard. Try to upgrade the original Macintosh to OSX Lion. Hehehehehe.
keyboard != mouth
This is a spelling mistake, not a grammar error. (Grammar = syntax = rules for putting together rule-following utterances in your language, of which this is certainly one example. He just spelled it wrong. Spelling is a learned skill; language itself, by which I primarily mean the spoken form, is something we are innately wired to acquire.)
I wish I could mod this up.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Thereby creating work for Slashdot's "duplicate comment detection" coders (the period was italicized). So: they should of stripped the tags before comparing the comments.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
"Living language" does not mean that everything that comes out of someone's mouth is correct. It's still possible to be wrong.
Exactly. Fucking "proof is in the pudding" meme.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
There's no way to upgrade to XP 64bit, or Vista 64bit, or 7 64bit, at any point, so you're stuck with 32bit forever (wasting a considerable amount of hardware capability). Windows 8 is said to be amd64 ONLY, so we'll see how this continues in a couple of years :-)
BTW: WHAT settings were preserved from 1.0 to 7.0? None that I see.
And the groups for monkey island and Doom were recreated at some point too.
What is really telling about this is that our microprocessors and motherboard are sufficiently backwards compatible. It tells you how x86 has stunted progress. Itanium was supposed to be a break out. So was powerPC. Yet they dies on the consumer vine (even though they live on in the server and embedded world).
Whenever I hear "too much time on his hands" I think it's really someone saying "I'm jealous because my life is grey and dull without an imagination".
What is really "imaginative" here is even daring to think you could get DOS to run on an old machine without an RS232/RS488 port. Either sheer arrogance, stupidity, or cleverness.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's a compound word.
I was enraged looking at every single install screen from 95 onward remembering how many reinstalls and other bugs I had to fix for people. Fortunately around XP's introduction I jumped ship for good, otherwise I'm sure I would be equally disgusted by Vista and Windows 7. The 95 and 98 logos made me feel particularly dreadful. Surprisingly, 3.11 didn't evoke so much anger, maybe because it was virtually useless and DesqView did multitasking better; I usually tossed it to make room for my BBS.
What I find particularly amusing is that, from a technical standpoint, GeOS on a c64 was more of an OS than early Windows. You could do more in GeOS in 1985 than you could with Windows from 1.0 to 2.0 (or arguably 3.0). Tandy's Deskmate was even more useful than Windows, and there were practically no third party apps for it. Early DOS-based versions of Microsoft Works were more useful than Windows for actual productivity, and it even included a terminal program (forced to use XModem though, yuck). We haven't even began entering Amiga and Atari ST territory.
Where was Windows ME?
Also, he should have put Microsoft Bob on and we would finally know if it worked with Windows 7.
Technically it might be commendable but is it actually sensible?
That backwards compatibility isn't free: it takes effort- effort that could have been spent making other parts of Windows better. It also takes up disk and memory and cpu. And it makes Windows itself more complicated (you have to support both the latest shiney and the old crud from the past).
Is it really necessary? Who cares that Windows 7 can run Doom? Apart from the willy-waving that you could if you wanted to, who actually will do it more than once?
So yes, admirable from a technical point of view but it strikes me that there was a serious lack of common sense in deciding to do it.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
you should of spent the mod points elsewhere
you should of spent the mod points elsewhere
Should HAVE, dumbfuck, HAVE.
I wonders anyone really did this sort of upgrade in real life? and still have the old applications and settings on M$ 7. Or the video just showing its possible no one care to do it coz lots of people do change there hardware during these long period of time. :)
http://askaralikhan.blogspot.com/
He left out ME but included Vista - BIAS!
I dont think I would do this for a large sum of money, let alone for free.
This upgrade orgy is a total waste of time. As it is to write this post. I guess it was fun doing it. However, it serves no purpose. In real setups the hard-drives changed the computer changed and the real problem was data migration. And it was always a mess. And it is still a mess. So my conclusion is: TheRasteri has too much time. And my advice get a girl/boy/whatever-friend. Hey its Friday.
Why did he stop at windows 7? Where is the upgrade to Ubuntu?
All these years, all this time, I was wondering: what is Windows good for? Now I know. It can keep a folder intact, version to version, version to version.
Too bad it can't keep the pink background all the way through.
You can't handle the truth.
... if you imagine the narrator is Roy from "The IT Crowd"
Think about it. Who would have access to all the operating systems and also spare the time to do such a thing.
It is pure PR to show that all those stories about Microsoft versions being incompatible are wrong... except that it doesn't show that at all.
It is the application file formats which are incompatible.
You should of not posted anonymous, could have gotten some good mod points.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Well I did have copies of windows 1, 2, and 3 and they were installed but found to be useless as all the applications I used were just plain old DOS based. Windows was installed only due to MAC-Envy I suppose. Windows 3.11 was finally found to be useful, along with WordPerfect for Windows. All of these were running on a 386sx computer BTW (except for windows 1 which was actually tried on an XT computer).
I had upgraded to a 486 machine when windows 95 came along. I later built a Pentium III computer which ran SE2, and we purchased a refurb HP computer from computer geeks with an Athlon cpu that ran ME. My wife's computer, along with the kids are now HP, Compaq, or Dells all with XP home. The Athlon II machine I now have dual boots between Linux with a 64 bit kernel, or Win7 32 bit. So I've skipped a few versions. I did not find ME as bad as many reported. It was no better, but no worse than SE2, and probably did have better driver support. Both SE2 and ME blue screened much more than XP (which almost never does).
He just doesn't get apostrophies.
The word is "apostrophes". It is the plural of "apostrophe", not "apostrophy". (Although, kudos for not making my head explode by spelling it "apostrophe's").
Infact X: is a symbolic link that points to something like \Device\HardDiskVolumeN or \Device\CdromX , etc under the object manager's global namespace.
Its probably there for backwards compat anyway. I'd wager 99% of the apps would stop working if that symbolic link wasn't present.. heh.
I have one such machine at home right now (and it's in service), a Dell Optiplex GX200 (beige). It supports up to 1GB of RDRAM, giving you the low end RAM requirement for Win7 and mine currently has a P3-933 in it, a tad short for Win7, but workable. Throw a halfway decent ATI based PCI video card in it and hard drive and you have a machine that SHOULD be capable of running everything from DOS to Win7. I've installed FreeDOS on this thing in the past and it worked just fine, so I'm only making the assumption that MS DOS 5.x would be capable of running on it based on that.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
;)
...so I installed Linux.
No compat in the next version though, so it's yet another advantage tossed.
Help stamp out iliturcy.