mechanic wrote:
On Tue, 14 Aug 2018 10:14:41 -0500, Char Jackson wrote:

They don't go back very far; for an afternoon's fun try loading
Windows95 with IE3 into VirtualBox.
I have 98SE available in VMware, but I've only run it a few times to see
if it works. It does, but it didn't inspire me to go even farther back
to 95.

What's rather shocking is just how creaky and old fashioned these
systems are. The jump from Win95 to XP seems to be huge, as is the
jump from XP to current levels of Win10.

Getting a virtual machine running with Win95 is rather involved
because the install CDs don't boot(and you need a product ID key, no
30 days grace). After finding a boot floppy image for DOS and
getting win95 to load, the networking didn't work for me (and the
network support tools are creaky). After getting that going I'm
stuck with a 640x480 window and no way of making that larger. The
sites with installer drivers for video won't load in IE3!

You can slave up the disk from the Win95 machine to
another more capable VM, and "inject" the downloaded
EXE into the container from there. Then shut down
that machine, go back and boot the Win95 one.

*******

For the really tough cases, you can always switch on
the emulated serial port in the VM and transfer
files across over the serial port.

Paul