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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."
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".
Kudos to Microsoft. And even greater kudos to VMWare.
The CB App. What's your 20?
I have, and I totally agree. Also, he fails in terms of "evaluating software compatibility"... many more applications from early versions of windows run in Windows 7 than he made note of, and he didn't even aknoledge that early control panels, designed for EGA usage, look beautiful in True Color because of the way they were programmed. Also, what's with starting with DOS 5.0 - Couldn't he have found a version released in 1.01? And not finding a 98 upgrade disk, or going to ME instead of 2K seemed moderately flawed...
should of also installed the video driver for higher res / more colors in 3.0 / 3.11 / 95 / 98.
I found the fact that he actually *could* upgrade all the way to Win7 and have applications still work utterly amazing. What other OSes can do that? Maybe linux (or maybe not...), definitely not OSX.
+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
Well, the video's author had the following conclusions -
1) That MSFT should be commended that there is a lot of backwards compatibility for over 20 years of operating systems as evidenced by Doom2, program managers, file structures remaining in tact.
2) That versions of XP, Vista and 7 were a little disappointing that they applied their own theme and color scheme and those settings weren't carried over between versions. Prior versions did in fact keep theme settings.
3) That the upgrade path and process has changed significantly over 20 years (obviously) and while it may have gotten longer (in time spent), it seems to have gotten easier for the end user.
Now, I don't know if I agree with any of the conclusions and I don't know if any of those conclusions are substantive, but that's what I got out of the 10 minute video.
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..
-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();
Classic apps won't run on recent versions of OS X, i.e. Snow Leopard or Lion.
I'm not really criticizing Apple for not maintaining compatibility, but your statement that a brand-new Intel Mac will run any PPC app is false.
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.
As the video explains, it was omitted because there is no upgrade path from WinME to Win2K. Remember that "Millennium Editon" came after Win2K, as a stopgap for the consumer market until WinXP was ready, so going from ME to the business-targeted Win2K would not have made sense.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
IBM OS/360 programs (circa 1964) are still binary compatible with the latest Z-OS. That's compatibility from OS/360 through MVT, MVS, OS/390 and now z-OS.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
He's just spent a whole day upgrading from MSDOS 5 to Win7. He probably doesn't want to spend another week getting linux to work properly.
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!!!
Cats and dogs don't have hands. Well, some do. I've got some in my laboratory that do, but that's a different story.
rewriting history since 2109
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!
The best kind... What's the deal? You have something against warped and twisted?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Windows 7 does snap windows to the sides to take up half the screen. It's probably the most used feature of Windows 7 for me :-) With multiple monitors you need to use WinKey+Cursor key.
It's also disingenious as it uses virtualisation. That's like saying my Win7 machine can run any x86 OS just because I can install VMware Workstation on it.
"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>
> Why avoid Windows ME?
The question contains its own answer, Grasshopper.
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.
I still have some useful old software on there after some 20 years using QNX at work. One of these days I will port it to Linux, but time being the main thing I don't have enough of...
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
...this strikes me as someone who has too much time on his hands.
... so I thought I'd go on Slashdot and post my opinion on that.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Because he's British.
It's irrelevant to everyone. It should be referenced with the environment variable %USERPROFILE% (or a suitable API call), because it *could* be anywhere.
you should of spent the mod points elsewhere
Should HAVE, dumbfuck, HAVE.
I doubt Linux. My understanding is that the jump from 0.x to 1.0 and from 1.x to 2.0.0 broke binary compatibility, as well as marking a major change.
Unisys's MCP operating system, the oldest OS still in production, has binary compatibility back to 1961. That is damn impressive.
"Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
I have my own corollary: "Those who understand Unix are condemned to invent it, well." (Read that in a somewhat insulting way and you get the idea.)
As someone who uses both Windows and Linux a lot, there's a lot to like and a lot to hate about both systems. I think Windows, especially recent versions, gets a bad rap amongst CS folks. And I think that there are a lot of things about Unix that I describe as persisting because the people who work on it refuse to acknowledge it's no longer 1975. (This is being deliberately antagonistic, and it overstates my feeling, but it does get the essence.)
For example, I've been involved in a few discussions over the years here about what a file system should look like for instance, and saying things like that I think Transactional NTFS is awesome and I wish *nixs would support it -- and I've gotten almost nearly unanimous dissent amongst Unix oldbeards. That's something MS has done right, and it's a huge pity that you can't write cross-platform software that uses a transactional file system.
This isn't to say Windows is perfect: it isn't, not by any stretch of the imagination. It's got implementation issues (buffer overflows), configuration issues (largely borne out of a desire for backwards compatibility), and what I feel it's biggest problem going forward is, which is an API that... is not very clean in many respects. (E.g. Unix's fork/exec method of process "creation" is way cleaner than CreateProcess because the latter has to take into account lots of stuff (changing the environment, remapping file descriptors, etc.) that you would do between fork and exec on Unix.)
But, the new iOS won't support my 2 year old iPod...
In the beginning, there was null.
ME MTBF 30minutes? Predictable isn't always good.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Funny I hear Tommy Shaw and an excellent guitar solo, but maybe that's just me ;-)
As for TFA it strikes me funny (again maybe its just me) that he stuck with the consumer OSes until he stuck in Win2K Pro and then suddenly went back to the consumer OSes. Maybe he just blocked out the horror that was WinME? I know there are plenty of us that would like to forget it, although trying to keep Vista running on my machine gave me some serious WinME flashbacks.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
I wish he was, but, sadly, he's correct.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/is-it-ok-to-use-oem-windows-on-your-own-pc-dont-ask-microsoft/1561
http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/licensing/sblicensing/pages/localized_licenses.aspx
A "system builder" is defined as someone who builds a machine, configures it, tests it, and sells it to a third party. Technically, homebuilds have to buy the full license, according to Microsoft's own licensing agreement.
Not a point I think they'd ever enforce, of course, but it's part of their legalese.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I guess you didn't actually watch the video.
Windows Me to Windows 2000 Upgrade Is Not Supported
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/272627
See comment in video at 6:07.
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.
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.
Actually it wasn't the hardware that was the problem. After dealing with one crashing WinME machine after another when I came across a customer that had a PERFECTLY running WinME machine I decided to investigate, and there I found the answer. The reason why WinME sucked for so many. Ready for the revelation?
His machine had NO VXD drivers, only WDM. Checking the other machines (including my own, which after watching a brand new WinME install crash in less than 20 minutes of just sitting I went Win2K) I found that damned near ALL WinMe machines had a mix of VXD and WDM drivers, and there lay badness.
If you had ALL VXD? Fine and dandy. ALL WDM? Good to go. A mix of the two? Welcome to crashy town. Sadly for WinME owners any hardware that had been manufactured pre release already had Win98 VXD drivers written, and since MSFT in their infinite stupidity said you could use VXD drivers the OEMs simply wrote new WDM drivers for new hardware while keeping the VXD for the old, which was usually sound and modem.
So there you have it, the answer to the mystery of why Win98 was more stable than WinME. if you were one of the few that got WDM drivers congrats, you were few and far between. Most of us got a mix and could set our watches by how fast WinME bit the dust.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.