Windows 1.0 Upgraded Right up to Windows 7 In Order

YouTube user TheRasteri decided to see what would happen if Windows 1.0 was installed and updated, one version at a time, all the way through to Windows 7. All major versions of the OS were included in the update process which means Windows ME was left out as you only had the option of Win 2K or Me but not both.

Windows 1.0 was first introduced in 1985 on November 20 and required that MS-DOS 5.0 be installed so that Windows could be installed within that. This is how the update procedure worked… DOS 5.0 and Windows 1.0. To check that all worked throughout the several upgrades, Doom 2 and Monkey Island were installed at the beginning and were tested throughout the install process.

Windows 95 was labeled as a step in the right direction for the upgrade process and it was noted that the process was far easier. However, the upgrade to 98 had to be side tracked a little due to an upgrade path not being possible in the usual way.

On to Windows 2000, it was noted that this is the first time the bit rate had been increased for the graphics and in doing this, the colors looked far better than before. Doom did not work on Windows 2000 due to poor DOS support.

XP SP3 would not work, but SP2 worked for the next upgrade. Doom started working again in Windows XP.

On to Vista, this upgrade process was the slowest of all taking 2 hours. Colors were not kept, but overall, things worked as expected.

Finally, Windows 7 was installed and everything still worked.

The only downside to everything was that the color schemes set in Windows 2.0 were dropped from XP onwards. On the plus side, everything else was retained correctly and other than Windows 2000 not running Doom, all other applications (such as Recorder, Card File and other legacy programs) functioned perfectly well.

The test was performed on a virtual machine and as can be seen in the almost 10 minutes long video below, all seems to go relatively well. Some problems were spotted in the begging upgrades where win.ini was only created as a backup and not actually used, but other than that all versions upgraded without issue.