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Show HN: Windows 95 in an Electron App
- jacob019 8y agoHas Win95's copyright expired?
- beefhash 8y agoNo, it hasn't. Copyright expires a couple of decades after the death of the/all author/s.
- Liquid_Fire 8y agoIt's more than just "a couple of decades", it's 70 years.
- vanviegen 8y agoSo can I assume that any self-respecting company producing IP has an army of toddlers 'working' on its products? ;-)
- Endy 8y agoOr that the company itself is legally the author.
- smpetrey 8y agoThis is simply delicious.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoA whole OS and it's still on the relatively small side for an Electron app...
- ct520 8y agoLOLLL
- lenova 8y agoThis has made my day.
- igolden 8y ago"Should this have been a native app?" - "Absolutely" lol. love it. Brings back all the nostalgia.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- honkycat 8y agoDoes anyone have a BonziBuddy download link?
- jannes 8y ago37 MB for the deb package... Wow. That's incredibly small compared to some other Electron apps.
- Redoubts 8y agoWhat do you mean, that’s like 27 disks!
- the_duke 8y agoWas Windows 95 really still distributed on floppy disks?
- extrapickles 8y agoYes, I installed it that way. CD-Roms were not on all computers until after the game Myst came out.
- Redoubts 8y agohttps://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050819-10/?p=34513 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050819-10/?p=...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mikestew 8y agoYup, I still distinctly remember installing it on my Toshiba Portege that way, because I don't know that external CD drives were even available yet. If they were, I couldn't afford one.
- MarekKnapek 8y agoYes, English version was on 15 (or 13 specially formatted) 3½ discettes. Localized into my language was on 28 3½ discettes.
- watersb 8y agoOh my yes. I signed up for a Microsoft Developer Network subscription, only $2000 per year, and they sent me just about every product they made, on CD-ROM. The Windows 95 CD ROM had a script that would write out the set of floppy disks. It was a long and tedious process, but to keep you entertained, you could watch the Weezer music video that sprawled across the unused hundreds of megabytes of the rest of the CD. If you had a workstation powerful enough to handle video. (I used those floppy disks to load up Windows 95 in a virtual machine on a Mac. Connectix Virtual PC, soon afterwards aquired by Microsoft. I started the boot process once it was installed, then I had to go to a meeting. Came back about 30 minutes later, just in time to see the boot process complete and display the Windows 95 desktop.)
- AdmiralAsshat 8y agoThere should be some practical purpose for this, like some Win-95 only app I loved from my childhood that I can now experience again. But I struggle to think of any.
- ct0 8y agoStarcraft
- jseutter 8y agoPinball?
- bevenky 8y agoMS Paint
- akerro 8y agoDiablo 2, Anno 1607
- doombolt 8y agoDiablo 2 runs just fine under Wine. They also have Mac version so you're covered.
- Rotdhizon 8y agoThe late 90s and early 2000s had a slew of fantastic PC games that I would love to be able to play again
- spapas82 8y agoFor me it's this game: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordor:_The_Depths_of_Dejenol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordor:_The_Depths_of_Dejeno... It is only playable on Windows 95 (and probably 98 and ME) and I have a Windows 95 virtualbox just for playing this game! I can't wait to test it!! As for the game itself? It's an old style dungeon crawler. Very primitive but after you play it a little you just get stuck and want to keep improving your character!
- alxlaz 8y agoGlad to see an Electron application that finally has a decent, native-looking, unsurprising UI :-). (Edit: sadly, I'm only half-joking. I was thinking about how fun it would be to extend this so as to bridge the host and the guest via e.g. a socket, so that I could get notifications about UI events inside the machine on the host, which would give me Visual Basic 6's UI builder and all the greatness of a 21st century machine, so that I could finally whip up an UI without yelling profanities at the CSS reference and in less than umpteen hours of tinkering with stuff that clearly just wasn't built for this. Thing is, halfway through, I really began thinking this might make sense a little and that depresses me. /done editing) That being said, if anyone's curious what else can be achieved in this manner, there's a bunch of nice demos here: https://github.com/copy/v86 https://github.com/copy/v86 .
- bevenky 8y agoWin 98 next!
- meredydd 8y ago> give me Visual Basic 6's UI builder and all the greatness of a 21st century machine, so that I could finally whip up an UI without yelling profanities at the CSS reference [...] that clearly just wasn't built for this Can I interest you in a VB6-y design/code/deploy tool with no CSS or JS? It's all in Python, even in-browser: https://anvil.works https://anvil.works
- johnhattan 8y agoAlso the Lazarus Pascal IDE is still around and is keeping the old-school VB flame alive. Just looking at the screenshots will make you nostalgic. https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
- rzzzt 8y agoiBasic is, however, on permanent hiatus: http://basic.mindteq.com/index.php?i=88 http://basic.mindteq.com/index.php?i=88
- 8y ago
- ihuman 8y ago"The Birth & Death of JavaScript" keeps getting more and more real
- TimTheTinker 8y agoLink for the uninitiated: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death... Reference in above comment is to the future “metal architecture” Gary starts detailing about halfway through. Gary Bernhardt’s presentations are always masterfully done. This one is particularly funny.
- jwilk 8y agoOn HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605687
- m_fayer 8y agoYou just beat me to linking that talk for like the fifth time.
- f055 8y agoNow I can test my websites on this old IE again!
- Endy 8y agoIn other words, now you can make decent websites instead of garbage! You're right, that makes this whole thing worth it!
- rcshubhadeep 8y agoThis brought back so much of nostalgia ... Thanks, man! Thanks a lot!!
- fiiv 8y agoIt's all about that SOL.EXE
- quickthrower2 8y agoThat was running slow for me, so I defragged the drive.
- xhrpost 8y agoAwesome. Immediately tried to jump into DOS by running 'command' and managed to break it.
- PopeDotNinja 8y agoLet me know when you get DOS running. Then we can work getting MechCommander working w/ SoundBlaster-compatible music.
- graycrow 8y agoI just restarted it via Start Menu and it won't start anymore. Bug?
- sbjs 8y agoI love traditional simplistic UIs like Win95 for their retro feel, and miss the days when you could skin apps. That ship probably sailed by now, but at least we get projects like this every once in a while. But isn't Windows 95 not allowed to be used unless you purchase a license?
- tinus_hn 8y agoChances are they didn’t get a license from Microsoft to distribute Windows 95 either.
- Someone1234 8y ago> But isn't Windows 95 not allowed to be used unless you purchase a license? Technically yes. Legally Microsoft has the absolute right to stop people hosting Windows 95's files for download/re-distribution. I'm guessing they choose not to since it is not-for-profit, and the cost of going after violators will be more than they make from sales.
- paulie_a 8y agoFun fact, the CD keys used to be in the format of 123-1234567 The first three digits didn't matter, the second portion needed to be evenly divisible by 7. In highschool I worked the summer setting up computers and we would just make them up. After a couple summers and some technology upgrades I doubt there was a legitimate CD key in that school.
- sciurus 8y agoThis is based on the javascript x86 emulator https://github.com/copy/v86/ https://github.com/copy/v86/ , which has demos online running many older operations systems like Windows 1.01
- tambourine_man 8y agoI’d love a version of this running classic macOS versions (7,8 and 9)
- spiralganglion 8y agoAgreed. At least we have this as a start: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/16/early-macintosh-emulation-comes-to-the-archive/ https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/16/early-macintosh-emulatio...
- ksherlock 8y agoYou could run System 7 via Executor under Windows 95.
- tambourine_man 8y agoI wasn’t aware of Executor, fascinating. Thanks.
- tonyle 8y agoNow we can bring back html based applications using html and vbscript and jscript. https://www.599cd.com/tips/hta/beginner/B1/ https://www.599cd.com/tips/hta/beginner/B1/
- digi_owl 8y agoThe layers of VMs and interpreters involved in this gives me vertigo...
- nategri 8y ago* me, crying * Please, no, you can't just Electron everything * hacker news points at Windows 95 * Electron'd
- nojvek 8y agoSucks that "Internet Explorer" can't browse websites. I just want to open aol, geocities, altavista may be?
- karulont 8y agoI was surprised. Completely on a different topic though. I noticed that emoticons were used in git commit message titles as a prefix. I did not know that github rendered those. And using CLI it is still readable: :wrench: One more Forge fix EDIT: formatting
- rainbowmverse 8y agoIs this vaporwave?
- bbcbasic 8y agoDoes it BSOD?
- niutech 8y agoWhat is a rationale for an Electron app when there has long been an online version of Windows 95? https://win95.ajf.me https://win95.ajf.me
- kirinrastogi 8y agoCan't you say this about 90% of electron apps?