The Mad Rants of a Raving Genius

For some strange and inexplicable reason, I decided to install MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in Virtual PC 2007 on my computer today. I think that qualifies me as pure geek, considering both applications (dating from circa 1993 for you non-geeks reading this) are useless for any reasons other than nostalgia.

Amazingly, despite a few hitches related to corrupted disk image files, I got both installed and running near-perfectly. I had to manually install mouse and CD drivers for DOS and some network stuff for Windows, but after all of that, I could do everything from playing Oregon Trail (seriously!) to browsing Wikipedia from the comfort of Internet Explorer 3.0. I even managed to dig up a copies of MS Office 4 and SimCity Classic for Windows and Norton Commander for DOS (to make it a bit easier navigating DOS). It’s kind of amazing what kind of old software you can find online, although most of what I’ve got installed on that virtual machine is probably semi-legal. WfW 3.11 may be ancient, but it’s made by Microsoft, and they’re notorious for disliking illegitimate software. Then again, while installing this version of Windows, I was told that it was all right (!) if I didn’t have my registration key handy. Fancy that.

Anyways, I still don’t quite know why I did this, since it caused me some grief when I ran into rather interesting errors and lack of memory (easily fixed through some settings in Virtual PC). I think it was more because I could do it that I did do it. Anyways, I won’t bother posting exactly how I got everything working, but I suppose I could if anyone wants me to. Just leave a comment if you feel the need to run abandonware in a virtual machine.