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".
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.
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.
VMware can grow disks. If I were doing this, I'd start out with a ~400Mb disk and grow it from there. MS-DOS 5 could cope with that, and the first time you'd need to grow the disk would probably be at around the Windows 2000/Windows XP install stage I think.
(In this case, it probably requires a bootable Linux distro for resizing the partitions on the virtual hardware disk though.)
VMware can also change the RAM available, too. Again, start small and grow bigger as you go. Whilst I haven't tried something as extreme as this, I've often created a small image (say a 5Gb to 10Gb disk and 256Mb of RAM) when evaluating a distro, only to extend either the RAM or storage at a later date. It's a minor faff, but quite doable...
Not true. You can install DOS 5 on a huge disk, but I don't think it will see anything above 512MB. You can use something like PartitionMagic to enlarge this to 2GB when you get to Windows 95, then to something larger when you get to an OS that supports NTFS.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
"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>
Because he's British.
> VMware can grow disks.
WRONG. All those products in the spam you get or that you see in magazines are just totally useless ripoffs and they'll probably just cause more problems than-- oh, you said DISKS. Sorry, never mind.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.