Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems?

Don't modern versions of Windows do the same? For example, I clearly remember that the Windows 10 installer first launches a Windows 7-like environment.

Yes that is Windows Preinstallation Environment (also known as Windows PE and WinPE)

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Enviro...

Aren't all modern (>xp) windowses just NT6 under the hood? Is there such clear delineation between 7 and 10 for example?

It feels like NT4, with 2000 on top of it, then a layer of XP, then Vista, then 7, then 8, then 10, and, finally, 11.

It’s not uncommon to do something that lands me on a dialog box I still remember from Windows NT 3.1. The upside is that they take backwards compatibility very seriously, probably only second to IBM.

It continued as 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3 for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1. But the NT kernel revamped for Windows 10. And they aligned the version numbers at that point. Windows 10 and 11 are both NT 10. The kernel has many differences within 6.x let alone the big leap to 10.

They're all NT, though I'm not sure how you mean "NT6"; XP was NT 5, Windows 10 was NT 10, and I think 11 is 11.

NT 6.3 was Windows 8.1, apparently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_vers...

There have been iterative substantial improvements to the NT architecture since Windows 2000 and later with Vista (where the UAC model started, rather poorly).

Just like macOS was Mac OS X (10) for a very long time, then they moved to 11 with Big Sur but it's really only in name.

macOS Sequoia is version 15, whoever reaches 20 first wins right!?

The installer runs in Windows PE (a stripped-down, live version of Windows). It looks like Windows Vista, because Microsoft never bothered to update the bitmaps making up the fake theme.

Incidentally, this is why most drivers broadly support 2000/XP (NT5), Vista/7/8/8.1 (NT6), and 10/11 (NT10) in those specific groups.

Joke's on them, I'm running Fedora

Like the services control panel that’s still 30% white space, a useless “extended” tab and doesn’t save any of the location or style data. It’s the best.

Yes it may not be the prettiest but I can get 20 year old games to run with relatively little troubleshooting.

IIRC there is only a single Windows 3.1 dialog box in Windows 11 (ODBC Microsoft Access Setup -> Select Resource file chooser). Lucky you.

Really? Windows2000 (which was based on NT) hit the sweet spot for me. Anything earlier than that seemed too buggy, and from there onward just seemed to devolve into a bloated mess of unrequested "features". (The very reason why I have been using Linux for 20+ years now as a matter of fact.) But yeah to be completely fair I suppose not everything they have produced since has been crap. There have been some innovations here and there...

All versions of Windows NT setup run in the same kernel that the installed OS is in. Pre-Vista versions would stick to a basic text buffer that was a lowest common denominator.

Windows Vista and newer launch a more substantial version of the OS with the graphics system and Win32 services running, but they never intermix versions. Windows 10's DVD loads Windows 10 to run the installer. That they haven't updated the pre-baked Aero graphics since Vista is a laziness problem, not indicative of being "actually Vista/7" :)

Linux has enough unrequested features as well, and the distributions are a fragmentation mess.

20 years ago, we thought eventually either GNOME or KDE would win, instead became even more fragmented, across all layers.

Windows 11 is still NT 10.0

Windows 10 also had a Windows 3.1 dialog in the Fonts folder (when you try to add a new font), but they fixed it in Windows 11.

I thought I read somewhere recently that they finally updated the installer

You can still run 50 year old games on your newest IBM Z16 mainframe. Microsoft is just a baby in this business. If you have a Unisys Clearpath boxes, you can even get get some 60 year old games running, provided you can read the punchcards ;-)

>Windows Vista and newer launch a more substantial version of the OS with the graphics system and Win32 services running, but they never intermix versions.

And yet, you can use the Windows 11 installer to install Windows 7 and have it be significantly faster because of that.

Remember very few people install windows in the modern world - most systems ship with windows, and then are only repaired or upgraded.

That is presumably why Microsoft doesn't put much engineering effort into the install-from-empty-disk case.

Fun fact: Unisys Clearpath today is just x86 boxen emulating the old Burroughs CPU architecture. You can even deploy Clearpath instances to AWS. And they still run Mr. High and Mighty Master Control, too.

That's as much just the mid-Windows 10 era shift from the Windows installer installing Windows "one file copy at time" to shipping virtual hard disk images and installing the whole thing like (but not exactly as) a container overlay.

Windows Vista introduced a wim-based method of installing where it effectively unpacks a whole prebaked installation image onto the hard disk. It is the X:\Sources\install.wim file on the install DVD.

I'm not surprised that you can mix up versions by modifying your installation image, since the installation method hasn't changed since Vista. As Microsoft ships them, however, you boot Windows 11 to install Windows 11. :)

MCP is the most user hostile OS I’ve ever had the displeasure of using. And don’t even start me about CANDE.

I also really enjoy there seems to be a lot of things that run on top of a mutant version of MMC. IIRC, that’s also from the NT4 days.

To answer your other comment: yes, the MCP from Tron was named after the Burroughs/Unisys OS. Bonnie MacBird, the screenwriter for Tron, is the wife of Alan Kay, who served as technical consultant, and she dropped references both to himself (Alan Bradley) and his areas of interest (Kay loved the Burroughs architecture and in particular its tagged-memory features) in the script for the movie.

Interesting to learn the real MCP was nearly as hostile as its fictional namesake.