Installing Every Version Of Windows Since 1.0

This charming lad has installed every version of Windows from 1.0 to Vista inside a VMWare instance, offering us a fascinating look at Windows versions since the early 1990s.

One interesting point: the first installs took a few minutes while the Windows 98 install took an hour and a half and the intervening upgrades took a between 45 minutes and an hour. You’ll also notice the clever tricks the various versions used to maintain previous settings including the backgrounds and program groups. Vista took a nice, healthy two hours to install, which sounds tiring and Windows 7 maintained a great deal of backwards compatibility with early Windows programs.