Over the weekend I "discovered" a copy of Windows 98 Second Edition (sometimes looking through my stuff feels as if I'm on an archeological dig). While I was trying to install it on VMWare Beta 4, setup kept failing after the "setup wizard" had been "prepared" (whatever that means). I tried different settings and still no luck. Changed drivers on the boot disk. Prepared the drive in different ways. Nothing.

Then I realized that the floppy from which I was booting had been prepared for an IBM Thinkpad laptop, and it contained DR-DOS 7.0.

Ah, DR-DOS. I remembered the trial (although I don't remember what happened with it in the end, and I don't even want to spend time looking more, the last piece of news I found on it is here) in which Caldera, who eventually ended up owning DR-DOS, was suing Microsoft for modifying Windows to fail with DR-DOS. I needed an original Microsoft Win98SE bootdisk. So I looked online and got a version from here. Created the disk. Booted.

Installed without a hitch.

Score: Monopoly 1, Little guy 0. I wonder why Caldera's lawyers had a hard time proving Microsoft's behavior. Seems pretty obvious to me.