Microsoft Virtual PC

» see microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i used virtual pc around 2005, on a windows xp machine in ankara, running a windows 98 guest to launch an older binary that had not made it across to xp. it worked. that was the entire pitch of the product. you could keep an old application alive after the os it was written for had been retired.

connectix shipped the first virtual pc for mac in june 1997. it ran a software-emulated x86 inside macos, slow but functional, so that mac users could keep using a stranded windows application from their school or workplace. the windows host version came in 1999. microsoft acquired connectix in february 2003 and renamed everything microsoft virtual pc. on the windows side it slotted into the os as the company's official client-side virtualization tool.

the headline product of the late period was xp mode. windows 7 professional users could install a pre-packaged windows xp guest free and run any old xp application inside it with desktop integration. it solved the corporate it problem of having a critical line-of-business app that nobody wanted to rewrite for vista or 7. for a few years that feature was the reason virtual pc existed.

windows 8 shipped in october 2012 with hyper-v client built into the os. hyper-v ran as a type-1 hypervisor underneath the os, free with pro and enterprise editions. it was faster than emulation. virtual pc was sunset to make room. the final virtual pc release was 6.1.7600.16393 in february 2011. on the mac side it was already gone, killed when apple moved to intel in 2006 and microsoft declined to port it across.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

in the corporate it shop of the late 2000s, virtual pc was the way you ran a windows 2000 or windows 98 guest on a windows xp host without buying vmware workstation. the spec was straightforward. a couple of gb of ram allocated to the guest and a vhd file as the disk. it was cheaper than vmware workstation and parallels desktop, and after a while microsoft made it free.

~ what got buried with it ~

the cultural moment buried with virtual pc is the corporate windows xp install base. for a long stretch between 2008 and 2014, the it department's polite answer to any line-of-business app that did not work on the new os was 'put it in xp mode.' that worked exactly long enough for the application to get rewritten or quietly retired. the moment windows 8 shipped with hyper-v and dropped xp mode entirely, the polite answer became 'replace it.' virtual pc was the last product microsoft shipped that pretended you could keep your old windows around indefinitely.

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