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1. WINDOWS 3.1 SETUP FLOPPY DISKS INSTALL
2. WINDOWS 3.1 SETUP FLOPPY DISKS DRIVERS
3. WINDOWS 3.1 SETUP FLOPPY DISKS SOFTWARE

For whatever reason, these two legends of the computing world seem destined to keep running into each other. The last piece of the puzzle was messing around the zip and xz commands until the disk image was small enough to sneak onto the chip.īelieve it or not, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Windows from this era running on a (relatively) modern ThinkPad. wasn’t able to get the sound hardware working, but at least the PC speaker makes the occasional buzz.

WINDOWS 3.1 SETUP FLOPPY DISKS DRIVERS

Just getting the display resolution up to 1024×768 (and still with only 256 colors) required patching the original video drivers with ones designed for VMWare. Of course, Windows 3.1 was not designed for modern hardware and no proper drivers exist for much of it. Especially given the fact most firmware replacements only fill a fraction of the X200’s 8 MB chip.

WINDOWS 3.1 SETUP FLOPPY DISKS SOFTWARE

Once the somewhat finicky software and hardware environment was up and running, it seemed a waste not to utilize it further.

WINDOWS 3.1 SETUP FLOPPY DISKS INSTALL

The adventure starts when helped a friend install libreboot and coreboot on a stack of old ThinkPads by using the Raspberry Pi as an SPI flasher, a pastime we’re no strangers to ourselves. It would take a little fiddling, plus the small matter of convincing the BIOS to see the EEPROM as a virtual floppy drive, but clearly those are all minor inconveniences for anyone mad enough to boot their hardware into a nearly 30 year old copy of Visual Basic for a laugh. A hacker by the name of thought that Microsoft’s latest and greatest circa 1992 might do well crammed into the free space remaining on a ThinkPad X200’s firmware EEPROM.

After all, SkiFree sure ain’t gonna play itself. But if you’re one of the people who looks back on these days fondly, you might wonder why we don’t see this tiny graphical operating system smashed into modern hardware. This was a simpler time, with smaller hard drives, lower resolution displays, and no hacker blogs for you to leave pessimistic comments on. It might be difficult for modern audiences to believe, but at one point Microsoft Windows fit on floppy disks.