"what is this, you may ask?" only nearly an hour of an entirely manually-crafted selection of bootscreens and startup sounds from nearly every edition, release, and beta release of Windows... from an alternate universe.
the amount of effort put into this is fairly staggering, to be completely honest. startup/shutdown sounds not withstanding. ...although the sounds repeat a lot, so you may want to skip through the video just to see the bootscreens or play it at 2x speed or something.
(or if you don't want to sit through nearly an hour of bootscreens there's also this video made by someone else that's basically the same idea but much shorter.)
my favorite parts of this are:
- how, in this universe, Microsoft's marketing team actually had restraint and just refused to suffix their OS names with anything other than the actual version number the OS was. This is the most unrealistic part of the video
- How some of the startup sounds are actual bangers (the KORG M1 VST doing the heavy lifting here, natch)
- How in this universe Microsoft apparently made a visual1 frontend for Unix??? Y'know, like IBM and Apple did but Microsoft did it too?? Hello???
- How Windows Embedded was originally called Microsoft Modular Windows and the logo is the tail of the Windows flag repeated three times in a circle. Fuckin' badass. Should have kept that name.
- how Alienware Windows 9.0's startup/shutdown sounds are. Alienware metalheart trendwhore-ass bullshit, I tell you. I love them
- how the startup 'Tada!' sound for the first three major versions of Windows sounds terrible compared to what we got. I mean c'mon you gotta breathe some life into those horns otherwise your computing experience is gonna be stupid bland
- What is a Tulip computer. If they existed I assure you LGR would have done a review video on it by now
there are a decent amount of these out there if you know where to look, but i'm gonna save linking those for a future retrospective about the history of the Windows Never Released youtube rabbit hole. watch this space
also if it weren't for @cathoderaydude making a twitter thread about these back in like 2018 i would have never gotten into this rabbit hole to begin with. thanks dude
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there actually was a real text-based frontend for UNIX that Microsoft distributed, called XENIX
