Thought this one was a pretty cool video. Got the link from Slashdot. Still amazes me that many things carried over from one OS to the next as they were upgraded. No surprise that WinME was not part of the upgrade path. lol

haha, I had Windoz ME for several years...learned some work-a-rounds to keep it working.

I made the mistake of upgraded my Win98se to WinME and after 3 major crashes (rebuilds), I ended up installing XP afterwards on that old machine of mine (now long retired). lol

There was Windows 3.1.1 and Windows NT left out too.

Wow, 1 1/2 to 2 hours to upgrade? I haven't upgraded anything in Linux. Anyone know how it compares?

Yeah; forgot about Windows for Workgroups. lol

I think the intent was to go from DOS to modern OS via the Windows FAT(32) route and NT (believe that stands for New Technology; lol) used a completely different HD Access system. Still you do have a point PM.

Depends heavily on how long it was since your last upgrde (and which distro you use). Usually the transition is rather gradual, but if you were to move straight from, say, Debian etch to Debian squeeze it can really take quite some time as well. A friend of mine recently made the switch and it took a few hours (including several gigs full download over a wireless though). Since the number of separately created program is so great in Linux, it's very hard to make sure all combinations work, so there's usually some manual fixing involved too (although often all that's required is to re-run the upgrade commando a few times to make sure it works around all it needs).

At any rate, this was a fun video. The dedication to get it done is impressive. It amazes me how primitive windows95 still was compared to, say AmigaOS, still as late as the mid nineties.
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Griatch

From windows 98 to present it's all gone down hill -

Gentoo Linux (and a few others) is a "rolling release".
With a rolling release you install just once.
Thereafter you upgrade just individual programs when they become available.
Gerard.

NT, that was a complete rewrite, used NTFS, which is the standard filesystem in XP, Vista and Seven. But you couldn't migrate from Windows 3.x to NT, the 3.x branch and NT branch started to converge in W2K for offices, and in XP for a larger public.