Retro Potato: Skilled PC customers are effectively conscious of the peculiar relationship between MS-DOS code and the GUI surroundings inside the Win9x ecosystem. Nonetheless, in accordance with Raymond Chen, the multi-OS help constructed into the Home windows 95 setup program was way more refined than it’d initially appear.
Raymond Chen just lately responded to an intriguing retro-tech query posed by a recreation developer on X. The developer inquired in regards to the three distinct person interfaces used throughout the Home windows 95 setup course of, which transitioned from DOS to Home windows 3.x, and at last to the basic Win9x GUI. Chen explaining that it was a deliberate design selection to attenuate the quantity of code required for the Home windows 95 configuration expertise.
With over 30 years of expertise shaping the evolution of Home windows, Chen possible holds deep insights into the hidden intricacies of the world’s most generally used PC software program platform. On his Previous New Factor weblog, he stated Home windows 95 setup was designed to improve programs from three doable beginning factors – MS-DOS, Home windows 3.1, and Home windows 95 itself. This necessity dictated the necessity for compatibility with three distinct computing environments.
The setup program was primarily written as an MS-DOS software, nevertheless it was designed to run on three totally different working programs to carry out distinct duties. The DOS portion was vital when the setup was launched from the MS-DOS immediate, as accessing the Win9x surroundings can be inconceivable with out first putting in it on the exhausting drive.
The MS-DOS setup part put in a minimal model of Home windows 3.1 – simply sufficient to help the 16-bit portion of the setup instrument. After booting into this miniature Home windows 3.1 surroundings, the 16-bit GUI setup program would launch. This software may additionally run in a full Home windows 3.x surroundings and even inside an already put in Home windows 95 OS, permitting customers to restore a corrupted system if wanted.
The 16-bit Home windows software was the centerpiece of the method, Chen defined, because it dealt with nearly all of duties required for the “actual” Home windows 95 set up. This graphical interface managed person interplay, collected configuration knowledge, decided which OS elements to put in, and carried out {hardware} detection to pick out the suitable drivers.
After copying the Home windows 95 recordsdata and drivers to the system, the 16-bit setup booted into the Win9x surroundings. The third and last setup stage concerned a real Win32 software, which finalized the set up by dealing with duties resembling putting in printers and configuring different peripherals.
By chaining collectively these three setup packages, Microsoft was capable of streamline growth by reusing a single codebase throughout all three important set up situations. “Every program takes you one step nearer to the objective. And the whole lot obtained applied solely as soon as,” the developer stated.