> What if I told you that Microsoft already had an operating system that did all the things you are trying to do, and it’s fully debugged, with video drivers, a graphics library, a dialog manager, a scheduler, a protected mode manager, and input methods. And it has a fully staffed support team.
I thought this was going a different place. Surely if you want to run an operating system, running Windows 95 itself would make more sense - then you could e.g. use the same drivers for setup that you're going to use in the real system.
> At the other extreme, you can write Windows 95 setup as a 32-bit GUI program, but that means that if the user is starting from MS-DOS or Windows 3.1, you have to install Windows 95 before you can run Windows 95 setup, which is a bit of a catch-22.
Back then a lot of the time you couldn't just boot from the Windows 95 CD-ROM; a lot of BIOSes didn't support bootable CDs yet, and would have to use a boot floppy as a shim. This would necessitate booting to a MS-DOS environment.
Also, if you didn't have partitions set up, you'd need to use MS-DOS FDISK and FORMAT to get things started, too. No way you'd have enough space in RAM to decompress and cram the entire Win95 UI into RAM to run it.
All in all, it makes more sense to go with the lightweight Win 3.1 intermediary step to bootstrap to the next phase.
I thought this was going a different place. Surely if you want to run an operating system, running Windows 95 itself would make more sense - then you could e.g. use the same drivers for setup that you're going to use in the real system.