Windows 95: The Hidden Story Behind the Text-Based Setup
Sun Feb 23 2025
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Windows 95's setup was a text-based experience for a reason, and it's not just because of the technology available at the time. The setup process was a complex engineering challenge that required three different operating system environments. This was necessary to handle the various use cases on customers' PCs.
The Windows 95 setup team had to deal with a lot of limitations. MS-DOS, which could technically handle graphics, was not the best option. It was too primitive and time-consuming. The team had to write their own graphics library from scratch. This was because MS-DOS didn't provide any graphics primitives aside from a basic BIOS call to plot a single pixel.
The team had to ensure that the setup program could display dialog boxes and support ideogram-based alphabets like Japanese and Chinese. They also had to manage simple animations. This required a new window manager with keyboard support for "tabbing" between different windows and hotkeys as quick shortcuts.
The setup application had to support extended/expanded memory through its own protected mode manager. The developers had to essentially write a new operating system just to start Windows 95 setup. This was a waste of time because Microsoft was already selling the perfect product for the job. The Windows 3. 1 runtime used in the final version of Windows 95 setup included everything required to "do graphics" under MS-DOS. It was fully debugged with its own video drivers, a graphics library, a dialog manager, and more.
The Windows 95 setup team had to consider the minimum requirements for the operating system. This included a VGA video card, so the team didn't have to worry about supporting older video generations like CGA or EGA.
Microsoft still follows the same code-recycling approach to this day. Modern Windows editions still need to install a "miniature" operating system to bootstrap the setup process. That minimal OS environment is now the Windows Preinstallation Environment, which is also used to (try and) repair Windows if something goes wrong with the OS itself.
The Windows 95 setup was a complex engineering challenge that required a lot of work. The team had to write a new operating system just to start the setup process. This was a waste of time because Microsoft was already selling the perfect product for the job.
