Windows Phone 'revived,' Windows 95 in the news, and Halo back on TV? Did someone invent a time machine?

The Windows 95 setup process went through three different operating systems.

(Image credit: Ben Wilson | Windows Central)

Windows 95's setup process was the virtual equivalent of three men in a trench coat. Upgrading to the operating system presented unique challenges for Microsoft over three decades ago, and the company's developers had to decide the best way to present the experience to users.

Raymond Chen, who has worked on Windows for over 30 years, shared a blog post last November that explained why the Windows 95 setup process used three operating systems.

The problem Microsoft had to solve was that people could upgrade to Windows 95 from MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, or Windows 95 (this last option was for repairing corrupted systems). One solution would be to use a text-based setup program that would work on all three operating systems, but that would not have been the best experience. The tech giant also could have made people install Windows 95 before setting it up, which would look better but was not an ideal solution either.

The final decision was to find a middle ground, as explained by Chen:

"In the middle is the happy medium: You can have the MS-DOS setup program install a minimal version of Windows 3.1, just barely enough to support what the 16-bit GUI setup program needs. This tiny version is small enough to be copied and installed off a small number of floppy disks. Once that’s done, boot into the tiny version of Windows 3.1 and run the 16-bit GUI setup program."

In a follow up to that post, Chen answered questions about why Microsoft did not just use graphics in the MS-DOS setup program. The long-in-short is that MS-DOS technically could have done graphics, but it would have required quite a bit of extra work.

"So now you’re going to write all this code for your setup program, none of which is actually involved in setting up Windows 95, but is just the infrastructure needed to run the setup program at all! There’s a lot of stuff here, and you probably won’t be able to cram all of it into 640KB of memory," said Chen.

"So now you need to write a protected mode manager (also known as an MS-DOS extender) so you can take advantage of the larger address space afforded by protected mode."

Taking that approach would have essentially required Microsoft to make another operating system that was solely for the purpose of setting up Windows 95. With that context, it makes sense why Microsoft decided to go with a different approach.

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