Can you upgrade a machine from Windows 1.0 to 7?

[thunderlizard]

Commodore 64 web server is hosted on a Commodore 64. Beat that!

[jmo21]

This is one area MS don't get the credit they deserve. When you consider the efforts they go to for backwards compatibility, it's somewhat amazing modern Windows works at all.

A friend of mine worked for MS in the app compatability team for a few years. It's a huge group in Windows.

[OwlHoot]

Geeky sorts love it. I know a bloke with a roomfull of old machines, Ataris, BBCs, ZX81 etc. ..

Richard Cranium uses machines like those for his web servers.

[Clippy]

Geeky sorts love it. I know a bloke with a roomfull of old machines, Ataris, BBCs, ZX81 etc.

Gave him a couple of QLs and a Spectrum. I will probably regret it when they start apreciating. Working floppies of DOS 5.0 will probably be worth £200 some day.

I know what you mean.

I was having a clear out a few months ago and stuck a brand new MS Intellimouse on eBay.

Got an email during the listing from a potential buyer asking if the mouse box was still in good condition and sealed which it was.

He eventually bought the mouse and, when looking at his feedback rating, turns out he collected computer keyboard and mice as that was all he bought.

Perhaps he had a museum in his house.

[Spacecadet]

amusingly the only time I ever saw windows XP blue screen (for something other than a catastrophic hardware failure) was whilst playing SimCity 4

[VectraMan]

This is one area MS don't get the credit they deserve. When you consider the efforts they go to for backwards compatibility, it's somewhat amazing modern Windows works at all.

WHS. And they did it again when they did an enormous amount of work to make sure home users would still be able to play games on Windows XP, the first of the "proper" versions of Windows (i.e. Windows NT) to be aimed at everybody.

Though it has to be said that things might have been better if they'd been able to do what Apple did and go at their users and developers and invent a new platform, but then that's the price of success.

[Sysman]

Why do you need to start with Dos 5?

Windoze ran happily enough on 3.3.

From the comments on the Grauniad article:

He did cheat somewhat though. If he had used DOS 3.1 which was the version available when Win1.0 was released this would not have worked as it lacked a proper memory manager. A third party memory manager (like QEMM) would have to have been used.

Yikes, I remember that memory management stuff. QEMM had a version which totally screwed the system, but before I could get on the phone to them the postman arrived with a replacement copy.

MS managed to muck that area up too at one point.

[Sysman]

Apparently you can but not sure why you'd want to.

The Guardian chopped the video size down there. 'Twas better watched direct on Youtube.

[d000hg]

This is one area MS don't get the credit they deserve. When you consider the efforts they go to for backwards compatibility, it's somewhat amazing modern Windows works at all.

Windows 95? No problem. Nice new 32 bit API, but it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95. Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn't free memory right away. That's the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.

[xoggoth]

Geeky sorts love it. I know a bloke with a roomfull of old machines, Ataris, BBCs, ZX81 etc.

Gave him a couple of QLs and a Spectrum. I will probably regret it when they start apreciating. Working floppies of DOS 5.0 will probably be worth £200 some day.

[Clippy]

Apparently you can but not sure why you'd want to.