Dolch Pac 65 - Part 4: Windows 98 Installation

We relive a full Windows 98 install on our now working Dolch PAC 65 hardware. My, is it painful. How did we ever suffer through it. Sorry, nothing breaks in this video, except for me installing right on top of my NT partition while I am proudly trying to show how to avoid it...

[Eo_Tunun]

This video is a perfect cure for computer nostalgia. It helps you to remember how you lost the will to live a gazillion times over, installing Windows.
In the early naughties, I had a Pentium III PC with buggy capacitors. Sadly, I had no soldering equipment at all, so there wasn´t a chance to swap them, thus the bugger would write across partition boundaries and corrupt the system on a regaular basis. I reinstalled windows twice a week in the end, knew my Windows Key from the top of may head, no more need to look it up. Oh, the tears of joy when I got a new pooter!

[AnonyDave]

Windows has detected you mouse moved. Please reboot for these changes to take effect

[MVVblog]

I am still using some Pentium4 with XP and i am actually watch this video on it with an old version of Chrome. On all my PCs and Servers i have XP, XP64 and Windows7 64, never a fail, never a problem! Great video Thankyou for sharing

[martypines]

Just wanted to say I greatly enjoy these videos. Thanks for filming this kind of stuff!

[Muonium]

Ah yes, the inexplicable snare drum of installation progress. I remember it well.

[JerryWalker]

Everything looks less capable when looking back at it. When I started writing software the interface was a teleprinter and all output was printed (No monitor) and programs were saved on punched cards. When we upgraded to punched tape the card reader seemed ancient technology. A PC with a (9" green monochrome) was astounding and my first colour monitor was amazing. DOS was incredible and Windows with its graphical interface was spectacular. I now develop embedded systems and have to say that I think Windows peaked with Windows 7 and it is now going down the apple route so that PC's are becoming useless for anything but social media rubbish. The old stuff was more fun if you were interested in the technology but today it is all about how fast they can send useless information to other machines rather than providing a flexible computing hardware platform.

[mxr]

What an excursion to my youth (and I am not that old anyway); Partition Magic, blue Microsoft installers, boot disks, ... stuff that even lots of younger IT people today never heard of. We got pretty lazy with all that automated installers, as now almost anyone can install almost any modern OS. Love it!

[joshmyer]

"Good" is such a relative term here… Your devotion to obsolete computing is impressive, if a bit masochistic at times =)

[bborkzilla]

I remember developing applications for Windows 3.11 based on Charles Petzold's book on the subject. The crazy memory management scheme it used was a real headache, what with memory allocation returning a "handle" which could then be locked down to a real memory location. You had to unlock the memory block so that WFW could move stuff around, otherwise you'd end up with endless holes and later allocations would fail.

[vxolimpic]

Well hello there 98! This brings back so many memories. What a fun project to do every now and then. I would recommend getting a copy of "System Commander". Configurable Boot manager, partition copy, and allows you to select partitions to share between different OSes. Saves bunch of time and more solid than Partition Magic. I've set up several multi installs such as yours. Keep up the great work!

[cacheman]

Lovely production values. Too bad someone will steal that very valuable Win98SE key from you.

[edgeeffect]

This takes me back to upgrading from Win98 to SuSE Linux.... "look, look, look.... I've even upgraded my kernel without a single reboot!"

[olafwagner]

I am very fascinated to see exactly how you get these 5 OS's installed. I have installed plenty of dualboot Windows/Linux machines, but never this complement of Microsoft OS's (many of which can see/read each other's partitions). Looking forward to it....

[macartm]

LOL it was good to see the walkthrough of the install. I'd forgotten what a pain in the arse it could be :D

Things have progressed a lot in the last 20 years, but probably largely because the industry adopted better (and more consistent) standards, meaning Windows could move to an image based install that works on nearly 99% of hardware and probably reverts to this loop on the 1%. And THEN hopefully in 99.99% of cases, getting to something that would actually run enough that you can get online and fix it ...

[kbhasi]

1:39 I forgot the PartitionMagic 7 bootable diskette ran on top of a stripped-down copy of Breadbox Ensemble. At least that's what I believe it is, while the TrueImage live CD ran on top of a stripped down Linux system, but Acronis tried to hide the Linux system by designing it to look like Windows XP.

[raywood]

Windows reboot deja vu screens, how much of my life has been spent waiting for computer reboots?

[trekaddict]

I'm getting horrible 'Nam-style flashbacks on seeing that Win98 installer again....

[shifter]

You worked at Microsoft? I'm really keen to hear more about your career path (if that's a video you would consider making).

[SoddingaboutSi]

Wow brings back memories of installing over and over again Win98 at work. I agree with you regarding Win98 SE. Very stable and reliable.

[twobob]

2:50 Yup, I was like "Click apply, CLICK APPPPLLLY" earlier ;) I too was a MS dev then, same disks, same story. Flashbacks, nice hardware, fun times