Comment by lightedman
1 day ago
We had Win95 running on a 25MHz 4MB FPRAM 286 back in high school. Poor teacher, half of first period was roughly how long it took to boot up, only for them to exit into DOS mode because the grading software and report card software was DOS-native and would hang if you tried running it under the GUI.
You certainly did not, as Win95 requires 32-bit, 80386 or better. 286 was a 16-bit CPU.
Windows 95 had a beta build for 286 systems, which is what this system 'ran.'
Bet you don't even know about Windows 97.
> Windows 95 had a beta build for 286 systems, which is what this system 'ran.'
I think you are confused. There was an Windows 95 build 286, but despite its name it didn't run on a 286 – it was just an incrementing counter which happened to have reached that number.
https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_95_build_286
At some point early in Windows 95's development, Microsoft dropped the standard-mode only 286 kernel, KRNL286.EXE. They also dropped 16-bit-only standard mode from KRNL386.EXE; but KRNL386.EXE required a 386 even for standard mode.
The earliest leaked Windows 95 build, build 22, still has KRNL286.EXE in it, but it is unchanged from Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and doesn't actually work – other Windows 95 components require new APIs which Microsoft added to KRNL386 but didn't bother adding to KRNL286. By the time we get to build 286, KRNL286 was long gone.
https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_95_build_22
In principle, you could likely patch early Windows 95 builds to run on a 286, but I don't think anyone has actually tried. At a minimum, you'd need to add the missing APIs to KRNL286.EXE
Taking you at your word, I suspect what you may have actually saw was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calmira – an open source project which gives Windows 3.x a Windows 95-style interface – or if not Calmira, other people implemented the same idea independently, e.g. the shareware Mask98 package – http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php?t=1262&view=min – however, this had nothing to do with Microsoft; Microsoft could have done something like this, but they had no commercial interest in doing so.
> Bet you don't even know about Windows 97.
That is just an unofficial/unlicensed third-party distro of Windows 3.11 with Calmira bundled.
https://crustywindo.ws/Windows_97
Separately, "Windows 97" was also what Microsoft once planned to call "Windows 98", but they weren't able to finish it in time to release it in 1997
It did not and it wouldn't have made any sense. By the time Windows 95 came out 286 systems were obsolete. They could barely run Windows 3.