20 years back I was excited by the prospect of a version of Windows that replaced the DOS based file system with a database based system called WinFS, although disappointed that it was forever delayed. I continued to be excited by the prospect that it may ship as an add-on for XP and Vista. Another year passed and that idea was also canned.
This post on The Register caught my eye this week, discussing some history behind Longhorn, and an overview by Dave Plummer over on his YouTube channel. Fascinating to hear some of the behind the scenes story, but sad it never saw light of day.
I downloaded the Windows Insider beta of Windows 11 for ARM, and took a look at what’s involved to get it installed and up and running under UTM?QEMU on a Macbook Pro with an M1 CPU (ARM).
First, since the download is a .vhdx disk, I used the import option in the UTM frontend to import from the downloaded file. I also checked the option for the Spice drivers:
After starting to boot, the installer requires a network connection and it appears to get stuck:
Articles such as this one recommend to press Shift-F10 to get to a command prompt, and then enter this command to continue with the install skipping the requirement for a network connection: oobe\bypassnro
At this point the installer reboots and restarts, and this time you get an additional option on this dialog allowing you to skip the network requirement during installation:
After a short setup of a couple of minutes, Windows 11 desktop!
Next, the resolution seems to be fixed at 800×600, so knowing I checked the box in UTM for the Sprice/virtio drivers, I noticed there was a CDROM iso mounted on drive D:
Running the installer, it started up, and keeping all the defaults for now, installed without any issue:
All in all, pretty easy, only about 20 mins setup and it seems pretty snappy so far!
Windows 10 runs surprisingly well on my (new) Mac Pro 2008. The Bootcamp driver download from Apple though is no longer supported on a 2008:
The main feature I’m particularly missing is the Bootcamp systray app in Windows to allow you to pick your boot drive, i.e. to select to boot back to MacOS from Windows. As long as you can get to the boot screen and pick which partition to boot from then this is ok (although since I’ve also added a PC version (unflashed) of an Nvidia 750 Ti, whenever I want to switch OSes, I have to switch my monitor cable between the stock Mac ATI card, and then switch it back to my 750 Ti after I’ve picked which OS I want to boot).
Without getting all the Windows drivers installed in one go from Bootcamp, the only other thing I missed initially (before finding this post), was Audio drivers. Windows 10 had installed some default drivers but the volume control didn’t have any control over the speakers plugged into either the front or rear audio out. Downloading the Realtek drivers direct from this site fixed this though. After installing the drivers, the names of the audio out devices changes on the volume control too:
Gary Kildall and his company Digital Research played a pivotal part in the history of the development of the IBM PC. IBM approached Bill Gates and Paul Allen to provide a number of programming languages for the original IBM PC, and later returned to Microsoft to ask if they could also provide the operating system. Not having anything available at the time, Gates suggested they talk with Gary Kildall at Digital Research, who had developed the CP/M operating system for 8080 based computers at the time.
The history of exactly what happened during the meeting with IBM and Gary’s wife at Digital Research may never be clear, but for whatever reason, Kildall was unavailable to discuss with IBM. When IBM returned to Gates and Allen, they decided to go talk with Rod Brock and Tim Patterson at Seattle Computer Products (SCP) and licensed their QDOS operating system for the 8086 for $10,000 and $15,000 for each company that licensed the product from Microsoft. This became the basis for MS-DOS, The rest, is history.
(If you’re interested, I highly recommend the book Fire in the Valley, a great book which covers the story of the IBM PC in detail, as well as earlier and later history)
The original location of Digital Research is at 801 Lighthouse Ave, in Pacific Grove, California. The building is now a private residence. On a vacation to Pacific Grove earlier this month, I looked up the location where the office was, and as it was only a couple of blocks from where we were staying, so we stopped by:
This IEEE have installed a plaque on the sidewalk outside the building to commemorate the contributions of Gary Kildall, Digital Research and the CP/M operating system:
