Chain of fools: Upgrading through every version of Windows | Hacker News Reader

Chain of fools: Upgrading through every version of Windows

rasteri.blogspot.ca

67 pointsaidos17 comments

Microsoft should consider including a version of this video on their forthcoming release of Windows 10 to run during the install process. This would make for a happy trip down memory lane for the older folks and it would also show those youngsters out there how much things have improved. The install would breeze by with this little video to watch, plus, if there were any niggles, you would think nothing of it as you would be reminded what a pain it was to install the earlier versions.

The video would also be of great practical benefit to those that had spent the last few decades locked away in prison, or having been in a coma or having been in a forced-labour camp in North Korea for all of that time. They could be quickly brought up to speed and made aware of the many new innovations.

I think that the use of GParted is telling - the Microsoft way is to force a fresh format of the disk in order to go from FAT16.

Coming soon: similar video of Slackware being installed and upgraded from version 0.99 to 14.whatever. That's bound to go viral.

A few years ago, I had an old Gateway 400MHz weakling box that could boot Slackware 3.2, and Slackware 13. I couldn't find an earlier version of Slackware that had an ISO image available.

Just by-the-by, Slackware 3.2 did not include an ssh of any stripe, just telnet.

ibiblio has a number of old distributions, including MCC (the first distro), SLS (which was so bad it inspired both Slackware and Debian), and Yggdrasil (the first commercial distro):

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/

Here's how to run them using qemu:

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/2097

And some history:

http://lwn.net/Articles/91371/

Actually, Microsoft has a FAT16 to FAT32 converter, which he presumably used since I don't recall gparted having that ability. Unfortunately, they provide no way to resize the partition after converting it.

Good point! It's been a while.

That's nothing. I remember a while back the NT 4.0 source code was leaked and being the devious shit of a teen I was, I downloaded it. I found the source code to the calculator and reversi, and decided to try to build/run them on Windows 7 with VS 2010.

It took about 30 minutes to get the calculator working, and about 3 hours to get reversi working. 14 year old source code (this was in 2010), complete with a GUI and mouse interaction, forward ported in one night. I was extremely impressed.

> Can you do the same thing with Mac OS?

Nope. Apple has based Macs on 6 different architectures ["24-bit" 68000, 32-bit 680x0, 32-bit PowerPC, 64-bit PowerPC, x86, x86-64]. Each migration has had a few years of backward compatibility that was phased out in favor of the new architecture.

People give microsoft a lot of crap for Windows having a lot of cruft but the fact that backwards compatibility works as well as it does is incredible.

backwards compatibility is a burden, not a feature.

Tell that to the millions of companies that don't have the money/means to update their os/stack every year and still rely on software written in the 90s

</Get of my lawn rant>

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. It's a burden which we grudgingly accept, but it's certainly not a feature. Nobody loves the dentist either, but we need to go occasionally

sologrrl: You seem to be hellbanned (I looked through your comments and didn't see anything objectionable, so I guess you tripped something automated)

sologrrl, your account has been hellbanned. I don't know why, though; your link is what you claim it to be except that the audio track has been muted by YouTube because it's a copyrighted Daft Punk song.

If you look at sologrrl’s comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sologrrl), you can see that her last three comments are all dead. She was most likely banned not for her most recent comment, but for her last few non-dead comments (which repeatedly criticize Hacker News’s moderation across multiple threads).

So is this like a weird twilight zone episode where if we criticize the higher powers bad stuff happens? That kinda makes me feel funny.

interesting that his main complaint was the fact that color schemes did not import from windows XP and beyond from previous versions.

loved this video, got my dose of nostalgia for the night.

Watched, chuckled, now savoring the masochism...

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