I have been following Raymond Chen’s blog, The Old New Thing, or several years and he recently posted about the process that Windows 95 used for installation. The installer was unusual since it booted into a limited MS-DOS environment, then a limited Windows 3.1 environment, and then finally into a Windows 95 environment. I had heard several reasons for this strange process for years, so it was nice to finally hear the reason from someone at Microsoft.

I recently saw a post about the newest release of FreeDOS and I wanted to take some time and see how well it works in 2022 on a laptop that was designed to run it from the late MS-DOS era.