This is a beautiful piece of geekery, Imagine taking the time to upgrade through every single instance of windows OS from Dos 5.0 (A prerequisite for Windows 1.01) to Windows 7.
Remarkably this is actually possible, so if by some miracle of time travel you had an 80 gb hard disk from the age where “640k aught to be enough for anyone” I could go straight through, and most of the programs would retain their ability to work.
i do have one small complaint about the video The Upgrade Chain goes like this.
Windows
1.01, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, Win95, Win98, Win98se, Win2k, WinXP, Vista, 7
This chain rightly leaves out Windows NT and the entire line, but it chooses to include Windows 2000 which was sold as a windows NT professional OS, the correct chain should have read
1.01, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, Win95, Win98, Win98se, WinME, WinXP, Vista, 7.
I’m not happy with WindowsME either, in fact it was quite possibly their worst attempt at anything, ever. But it still needs to be there. Windows 2000 was a wonderful and stable OS, but it wasn’t a consumer OS.
Still watch the video and enjoy. You wonder why windows users complain about backwards compatibility when its not there, because they are used to it. Apple makes no promises like that. In fact a video like this is impossible with apple, because of the PPC – Intel switch. And probably a couple of other reasons as well, I’d still like to see an attempt.