And the second The Old New Thing story, about adding a Windows 3.1 virtual machine to Windows 95.
As the Windows 95 project started to come together, I was approached to undertake a special project: Run Windows 3.1 in an MS-DOS virtual machine inside Windows 95.
This was the ultimate in backward compatibility, along multiple axes.
First of all, it was a demonstration of Windows 95’s backward compatibility by showing that it could even use an emulated MS-DOS virtual machine to run the operating system it was designed to replace.
Second, it was the ultimate backward compatibility ripcord. If you had a program that simply wouldn’t work with Windows 95 for whatever reason, you could fire up a copy of Windows 3.1 in a virtual machine and run the program there.
To use it, you installed Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 into separate directories, and then made a few edits to the Windows 3.1 SYSTEM.INI file to replace the mouse and serial drivers with special versions. There were some other preparatory steps that had to be done, but eventually you got to the point where you could double-click the Windows 3.1 icon, and up came Windows 3.1 in an MS-DOS virtual machine.
This is quite similar to how Windows 3.x worked in OS/2 at the time.
Of course, MS had the inside track on Windows 3.1, and could nobble it as required so that it wouldn’t work in OS/2’s equivalent environment.
I wonder if they’ll blog the more nefarious efforts?
Microsoft wrote most of the OS/2 windows 3.1 compatibility code. Microsoft was heavily involved in OS/2 development until they fell out with IBM and decided to start working on the NT family of OSes instead. Early OS/2 versions (1.2 to 1.3) essentially use the Windows 3.x UI (1.1 used basically the Windows 2 UI) and the intent was originally for OS/2 to replace Windows.
Edited 2018-05-21 23:18 UTC
What are you talking about? It worked fine in OS/2. Better than fine actually, I still would argue OS/2 ran Windows 3.1 apps better than Windows 3.1 did, if for no other reason than the option to run them in an isolated process was available to you.
Ah, actually, it was DR-DOS that got intentionally nobbled by the move to Windows 3.11.
Still, it was a moving target, and OS/2 needed patching for each update to Windows 3.x.
The entire Windows Desktop is stuck at the last decade. Because by the start of the 2010s Microsoft embarked on a journey to replace the desktop with Metro and then with Universal/Modern apps and decided to leave the desktop to rot.
Which means I have to go through the Metro “settings” (that’s where the taskbar icon gets you now) and then to the good ol’ Vista-era control panel power management item to check my GPU power management settings, then go to XP-era interface to set my default printer, then a Windows 2000-era interface to check device manager things or unzip a file and then to a NT 4.0-era interface to mount an unformatted drive or manage fonts.
Microsoft used to replace the oldest part of the OS when they became hilariously dated, for example they replaced the sound inputs and outputs dialog in Windows Vista (or was it 7?), but after Metro happened, nah…
Edited 2018-05-21 22:35 UTC
You seem to be stuck into a pre-W10 Windows version, given the UI updates on the settings panel.
This is the same feature talked about on OSnews in February – http://www.osnews.com/story/30188/Switch_to_Windows_95
Same news posted twice? 😀 😀 Made my day 😀
Heh, after 15 years of OSNews, it’s only natural this would happen
.
Not the first time…
Though to be fair, this time it didn’t really happen – news article is fresh, that older OSNews item was about different one …good enough.