Well, this is something I never knew. Over on the retrocomputing section of StackExchange, someone asked why the second phase of the Windows 98 installation looked decidedly different from the third phase, even though they’re both graphical phases (the first phase is textual). The answer turns out to be both surprising, and entirely predictable.
The first phase is a DOS program called DOSSETUP.BIN, which is the infamous blue part of the installation. The second part, however, is what we’re interested in here, and if the first phase is DOS, and the third phase is Windows 98 itself… What do you think the second phase is running? Yeah, exactly.
Basically, because it is running under Windows 3.1 at that point.
The second uses this minimal Windows 3.1 to run a Windows 3 program,
W98SETUP.BIN(specified as the “shell” inSYSTEM.INI).This starts by copying more files to support all the information-gathering during setup, and various other niceties including the 3D look shown in your screenshot (the contents of the
Stephen KittPRECOPYCABs); it ends by copying most of Windows 98, setting the system up so that it will boot Windows 98 from the target drive, and rebooting.
So, in order to install Windows 98, you first run DOS, followed by Windows 3.1, ending in Windows 98. I have no idea why this is so funny to me, especially since it fits entirely within expectations of how Microsoft does things.
Yes, my college computer running win 98 was damaged, likely due to the massive Electric grid substation outside my window blasting it 24-7 with EM waves, I had to fix DOS first, then I was able to use the latent win 3.1 functionality to fix the windows 98 part. It was fun. I should have documented it better, but my documentation would have to be hand written as my PC was very much not working.
Ah, someone new is discovering mini.cab. Lots of fun things you could do with it back in the day. Handy little win16 runtime.
Using it makes sense really as the installer has to work and be stable on pre-release versions of the OS during development, so they just reuse a well understood and stable stripped down version of the most recent version to do run the installer. They did that for 95, and 98 as a relatively minor incremental improvement retained the same setup flow. The Windows PE/RE is somewhat based on an older version of the stack too though they may use some newer components.
> Ah, someone new is discovering mini.cab
Ha ha, yeah I was thinking “is this not common knowledge?” but then remembered I’m 40 and perhaps this kind of thing is just slowly getting lost in time.
What is more?
Some early versions of Windows had utilities like disk defragmenter run in that mode. It was much better than running in Win32 desktop, as there would be a lot of restarts and conflicts in the full desktop, whereas the win16 version would run at full speed.
(Of course introduction of better IDE/ATA drivers changed that).