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Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems?

(devblogs.microsoft.com)
304 points mooreds | 4 comments | 17 Nov 24 19:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.85s | source
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xeromal ◴[17 Nov 24 20:41 UTC] No.42167034[source]▶
I love that little nugget of info at the end. You could originally run excel standalone without an OS and it came with windows 2.1 bundled
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1. tech234a ◴[17 Nov 24 23:08 UTC] No.42168173[source]▶
Only a thumbnail from the Wikipedia page mentioned in the article was saved to the Internet Archive [1], but it appears the same image was uploaded to Wikia: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/windows/images/3/34/Excel2....

The original description of the file uploaded to Wikipedia read [2]:

Microsoft Excel 2.1 included a run-time version of Windows 2.1

This was a stripped-down version of Windows that had no shell and could run just the four applications shown here in the "Run..." dialog.

The spreadsheets shown are the sample data included with Excel.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090831110358/http://en.wikiped...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20081013141728/http://en.wikiped...

replies(1): >>42168439 #
2. thaliaarchi ◴[17 Nov 24 23:56 UTC] No.42168439[source]▶
The current article[0] says:

> Excel 2.0 was released a month before Windows 2.0, and the installed base of Windows was so low at that point in 1987 that Microsoft had to bundle a runtime version of Windows 1.0 with Excel 2.0.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel

replies(1): >>42171708 #
3. hulitu ◴[18 Nov 24 12:10 UTC] No.42171708[source]▶
Did Windows 1.0 run without DOS ?
replies(1): >>42174237 #
4. icedchai ◴[18 Nov 24 16:51 UTC] No.42174237{3}[source]▶
No. No version until NT ran without DOS. Even if you installed Win95 from scratch, DOS was there, bundled.