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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

I’m genuinely delighted by the “here’s a demo, except it’s only served through a protocol unsupported by the browsers you’d want to try it on” thing. It fits in so beautifully.

Reminds me of how in 2012 I tried to install IE6 on a Windows 2000 Server machine, to improve my experience over IE5 for the purposes of making a simple HTA GUI for some simple scripting, but even once I could find a copy of the IE6 installer, it no longer worked, presumably because it depended on something on the public internet that was no longer there in some way. So I coped with IE5. (And I think it was 5.0, not even 5.5.) I don’t know exactly when that machine was finally decommissioned, but it was definitely gone by 2020.

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I had to find a copy of 'IE6 Full' on archive.org in the process of making this blog post. Most copies of IE6 are web installers.

I have to say I'm really quite irritated by Microsoft's habit of deleting old software from their download site, forcing people to get it from potentially untrustworthy third parties. I'm fairly sure there's some downloads on there that are just gone for good.

And, ah, wow. I was not expecting someone to mention IE HTAs here. Welcome to the club. ;) Another thing for the blog queue in the future, though frankly the number of IE-specific technologies is so large I should probably break it out into a separate series.

I found a full installer, but it still didn’t work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Actually it’s coming back to me now, I’m confident it was IE 5.0 that was installed, because once I failed to install IE 6, I tried to install 5.5, and failed at that too.

Really enjoying your series, by the way. So far I’ve known at least a little about all of them save GateKeeper (though I have come across it as a general concept), but I’m impressed with the depth you’re delving to each time. I hope you’re enjoying the process plenty too!

I develop a hyper-compatible Web framework, so I test regularly in 3.0, 4.0, 5, 5.5, and 6.

The easiest way I have found to run them is to use VirtualBox with Win95 and WinME VMs.

You can make a snapshot of each installed IE version to save space.

You both could look for official (checksummed) MSDN of Office CD images from the era, or for other software that stated its support for specific Windows version, and had to bundle important system component updates to depend on. Those installers could still assume offline installation, and work in older Windows.

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