This is a beautiful piece of geekery, Imagine taking the time to upgrade through every single instance of windows OS from Dos 5.0 (A prerequisite for Windows 1.01) to Windows 7.
Remarkably this is actually possible, so if by some miracle of time travel you had an 80 gb hard disk from the age where “640k aught to be enough for anyone” I could go straight through, and most of the programs would retain their ability to work.
i do have one small complaint about the video The Upgrade Chain goes like this.
This chain rightly leaves out Windows NT and the entire line, but it chooses to include Windows 2000 which was sold as a windows NT professional OS, the correct chain should have read
I’m not happy with WindowsME either, in fact it was quite possibly their worst attempt at anything, ever. But it still needs to be there. Windows 2000 was a wonderful and stable OS, but it wasn’t a consumer OS.
Still watch the video and enjoy. You wonder why windows users complain about backwards compatibility when its not there, because they are used to it. Apple makes no promises like that. In fact a video like this is impossible with apple, because of the PPC – Intel switch. And probably a couple of other reasons as well, I’d still like to see an attempt.
Consider this a Little FYI for those of you looking forward to Windows 7, and those who are trying to understand why we have so many issues with compatibility between XP and Vista.
From what I gather in XP, Microsoft let people put files anywhere, programmers, coders, applications, whoever cared to write anything for XP you could store files wherever in the hierarchy permissions and best practices be damned. The same went for how you pulled information from the operating system, access any file you like and go for the gusto! This was great for quick and dirty coding but horrible for security and conformity. When Microsoft laid out the groundwork for Vistathey moved towards focusing on standards, best practices, and security. This caused some issues.
Jumping ahead to Windows 7 after my quick look it looks to be the same. However here is the big change. Vista coughed up a lung when it found files out of place, or programs tried to interact with the OS in a way they weren’t supposed to, it couldn’t deal with them. Programs broke willy nilly allover the place, and the place was a wreck. In Windows 7, a new feature called XP mode will enable programs to work within a sandbox, so they can store files in places where they would like, to a certain extent I’m sure, and then drop back out of XP / Sandbox mode for the rest of the OS to work correctly. XP mode is designed to be an insulated environment which gives you security and functionality at the same time.
Moving forward Microsoft will be focusing on pressing developers to work within API’s, and place nice with the file system. But until everyone is on the same page I think XP mode, whether you understand what its doing or not is goign to make people a lot happier with the next version of Windows.
The sad thing about this whole mess is that Microsoft gets all the blame while the people who wrote sloppy code get to throw a fit.
I hope this little blub goes a ways to explain the issues that are out ther right now, and please if you think I’m off base throw down in the comments.
Hat tip to Chuck for bringing the issue up in the comments of CaffiNation 336 and getting me thinking.
Just an FYI to people who listen to my show. I often post news from a site called mopo.ca, but today when i visited the site looking for the funny content I was accosted by a warning screen telling me i have a virus and the website is dangerous… OK, didn’t even look close to being real. i hit the escape button.
Then a fake virus scan ran and this lovely error message popped up in the window. The malware was trying to get me to install their “special” Antivirus, but the OS seemed a bit off. I’m working on a Mac right now… the Windows XP menu looks a bit out of place.
Sad thing is its very easy to have a website do a browser check to not only see what type of browser you are viewing the website with, Internet Explorer, opera Firefox ect, but also what OS th browser is running on. So if the scammers ever really got their act together they could theoritcally do a good job, but apparently they are slopy, so hold off visting that site until further notice and as always don’t install anything a website trys to force you to. To exit out of a program trying to hijack your machine on a PC, hti CTL- Alt -Delted and close the offending program, on a Mac hold down Option, Apple and Esc to force quit.
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