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Windows93
- aargh_aargh 7y agoNitpick: Turbo C in DOSBox doesn't work by default. Options - Directories point to C:\TC\ whereas Turbo C is actually installed in C:\.
- hluska 7y agoMy four year old doesn’t believe that computers ever looked or loaded like this. Hacker News is ‘farty’ and ‘telling stories’ today. Edit - The four year old doesn’t believe that I went to school. This is going to be quite the ride to daycare...
- ConceptJunkie 7y agoOne of my kids asked me, when he was 4, if the negative numbers go on forever. To this day, almost 20 years later, that still blows my mind.
- ConceptJunkie 7y agoAnd no, he's not a math whiz. None of my kids are. That was disappointing. But he's a whiz at plenty of other things.
- paulmd 7y agoHe'll probably think Hilbert's Hotel is pretty fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faQBrAQ87l4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faQBrAQ87l4
- JadeNB 7y agoWhat does "telling stories" mean in this context? It actually sounds like a pretty good description of HN to me …. (EDIT: Oh, I guess it means lying.)
- hluska 7y agoI’m very sorry. My child has a wonderful imagination and loves to tell stories. Sometimes the stories happened (they are true) and sometimes they didn’t really happen (they are stories). In our family, we have telling truths (these are things she saw and that I can ask other adults about) and telling stories (these are things that she didn’t see with her eyes). We don’t have a concept of lying yet, but that will likely come this year. For now, ‘telling stories’ fills the role of lying.
- rjsw 7y agoDo you read books to your child ? I can remember stuff from quite a young age, I think that one thing I took from getting books read to me was that inventing worlds and setting stories in those worlds was just something that everyone did.
- hluska 7y agoWe read almost constantly and she has been surrounded with books since she was an infant. Now that she’s a little bit older, she ‘reads’ and I read to her. At bedtime, she’ll often ‘read’ a book with a lot of pictures, then I’ll read it back to her and then we’ll switch to a book with fewer pictures and I’ll read it to her until she goes to sleep. Do you have any book recommendations? I’m always looking to add to the library! :)
- balls187 7y agoAny libraries near you? Our system (king county library system) is top notch, and their children section is organized with books specific to children development: life events, feelings, bedtime, concepts, etc. Every two weeks I go and pick out new books, rotating topics.
- hluska 7y agoWe live two blocks from a library and she goes regularly. It’s great on weekends (especially during the winter) - it’s full of kids and it’s a lot of fun. I like asking people for book, television or even website suggestions. We’ve found some unbelievable gems that way, including a site she uses to ‘wave to the International Space Station.’ :)
- Waterluvian 7y agoThis is my favourite part about my 3 year old. I love when he combines his imagination with his ability to have unwavering opinions on things. Recently: a conversation in which he insisted that no, that person isn't my dad, it's his grandpa. But I have a dad too. No, you're my dad. That's grandpa. etc. Also I'm apparently five years old which is very old. Mom got off easy. She's four.
- exikyut 7y agoUndeniably interesting to witness how the yours/mine infrastructure hasn't come online yet.
- hluska 7y agoI love this comment - it describes so much of my child and reminds me so much of her, right down to her confidence about her grandparents’ ages. She’s a little older so she knows some pretty big numbers. I’m 20, her granny and grandpa are 20 and she’s either 4 or if she wants to be the boss she’s ‘10 hundred’. :) But you’re 5. That’s really old...
- balls187 7y agoI took my 3 year old to a local wilderness park. After, we talked the animals, and he confidently told me that he "was almost eaten by a bear."
- zaat 7y agoYou say that you have a dog? Yes, a villain of a one, said Clesippus. And he has puppies? Yes,and they are very like himself. And the dog is the father of them? Yes, he said, I certainly saw him and the mother of the puppies come together. And is he not yours? To be sure he is. Then he is a father, and he is yours; ergo, he is your father, and the puppies are your brothers.
- asveikau 7y agoIt didn't look like this. Especially not in 1993. They are mixing a bunch of metaphors from different time periods. Mostly late 90s but nothing ever animated like this either.
- toyg 7y agoUh, not in 93, but around 98/2000 definitely it looked like this. Well, without the animated windows effects. (I’m looking at v1 only, on mobile at the moment)
- anticensor 7y agoWindows 93 is what became Windows 95.
- roelschroeven 7y agoNah, I don't think so, Windows 95 was codenamed Chicago before it was released. I can't remember ever having seen the name "Windows 93" mentioned in that time.
- chungy 7y agoYou wouldn't have. It was still being called "Windows 4.0" until very close to its release in 1995.
- anticensor 7y agoSee The Old New Thing, by Raymond Chen: https://books.google.com.tr/books?id=wYrCitbs5PQC https://books.google.com.tr/books?id=wYrCitbs5PQC , where he says "Windows 95 was originally Windows 93, after all."
- roelschroeven 7y agoYou're right, apparently, and I was wrong. Wikipedia says so too: > So the development of Windows "Chicago" was started and, as it was planned for a late 1993 release, became known as Windows 93 which was also known as Windows 4.0.
- duxup 7y agoAt 4 years old they're not able to understand how much world there is outside their own.
- tartoran 7y agoYes but their imagination knows no boundaries. Later on they get it but so does their imagination diminish.
- williamdclt 7y agoI'm quite unconvinced by that. This might be true, but most of "kid imagination" I've seen or heard of was mashing up things they've had some experience with ("the dinosaur fights the action man", "my uncle can teleport"...). They don't seem to be able to think in the abstract, or even think outside any box (such as imagining that somebody could be more than 10yo! What would a 1000yo, 10000yo be like? An adult would have much much more imagination). We find them funny and weird because they take mash up things we got bored or familiar with (dinosaurs, age), so they shake up our world a bit. But imaginative? Some adults are terrible at imagination, but many are amazing
- latexr 7y agoAgreed. I keep coming back to a comic by Boulet which you might enjoy: http://english.bouletcorp.com/2007/12/11/fuck-peter-pan/ http://english.bouletcorp.com/2007/12/11/fuck-peter-pan/ Part 2: http://english.bouletcorp.com/2008/06/19/fuck-peter-pan-part-2/ http://english.bouletcorp.com/2008/06/19/fuck-peter-pan-part...
- williamdclt 7y agoHaha Boulet is great, I forgot about this particular comic, thanks! Exact explanation of what I mean
- zaat 7y agoLast Friday, at my parents house, I showed my four year old an album of me as baby, when she failed to guess who's in the pictures and was told it's me, her face was at first sheer horror, then total disbelief.
- matthewhartmans 7y agohaha this made my day! thanks man :')
- anthilemoon 7y agoThe trollbox is probably the scariest part.
- have_faith 7y agoProgress Quest is a surprisingly engaging game
- cstross 7y agoOh dear Cthulhu, I'd totally forgotten about the Hamsterdance!
- rjsw 7y agoITYM Hampsterdance.
- Symbiote 7y agoThat was one of the first daft websites I remember visiting, when it was first possible to use the Internet on a computer at school. (That's a computer, the one with the dial-up modem.) Start → Programs → hampster to see it here. [1] http://www.angelfire.com/id/hern/ http://www.angelfire.com/id/hern/ and then open http://www.angelfire.com/id/hern/images/plasticjesus.wav http://www.angelfire.com/id/hern/images/plasticjesus.wav and play it on repeat, since web browsers won't do this automatically any more.
- ChrisArchitect 7y agoprevious hits from past 1-5 years https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14531578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14531578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9162566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9162566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8507786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8507786
- piqufoh 7y agoGrah - I had checked for previous posts, but only by pasting the URL into HN search (no hits). I'll try harder next time, apologies for the noise.
- dr_zoidberg 7y agoLast one (from GPs list) was from 2017. I wouldn't call this a blatant repost by any means. And there are some good conversations going on too, so there's value in that. My point: don't sweat it, it was good that you posted this.
- exikyut 7y agoDon't worry about it - it wasn't posted too recently so the rules haven't been dented, and it's amusing.
- jonnycomputer 7y agoWell, I didn't see it then, and well, glad to see it now.
- djsumdog 7y agoHackernews clears the existing post check after a given time period. Refreshing old stuff occasionally is not against the rules and sometimes encouraged because not everyone sees it the first time, or sometimes people just like to comment on reruns.
- dang 7y agoReposts are ok after a year or so. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
- theandrewbailey 7y agoMy vapors are waved.
- gwbas1c 7y agoI'm kinda curious about the backstory. For example, the NES emulator is kinda cool, (even though I can't get the arrow keys to work,) and each game is an accomplishment in itself.
- Atheb 7y agoSo it seems to be able to open itself quite well: https://imgur.com/a/dkEYrFW https://imgur.com/a/dkEYrFW
- ComodoHacker 7y agoIn the Trollbox chat log I see >~anonymous is now known as wuhan-clan Is this added lately? If so, its very convincing.
- usrusr 7y agoSocial media on windows93.net is a massive live UGC sandbox. Take for example https://myspace.windows93.net/ https://myspace.windows93.net/ , you could spend days getting lost in retro parody reenactment without even wrapping the experience in the windows93 desktop.
- Tucanix 7y agoCan confirm, I got lost: https://myspace.windows93.net/?id=244 https://myspace.windows93.net/?id=244
- bigyanshr 7y agoGood old days :D
- lqs469 7y agoEven there is a Half-life 3 and it's loading forever.
- syx 7y agoThis site is truly amazing, it's really inspiring to see how some people can get so creative using the old Desktop GUI metaphor. I'm personally curating a list [1] of all these websites and webapps that look like vintage desktop UIs. [1] https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-gui-websites https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-gui-websites
- megadrive 7y agoApologies I'm not familiar with request process on your github. Your list is great, I have some of those already saved as bookmarks. But here is another good one, Amiga workbench; http://www.chiptune.com/ http://www.chiptune.com/
- syx 7y agoThanks so much for this site, it's really well crafted! For your information you can simply modify the file README.md and then open a pull request for your submission.
- whywhywhywhy 7y agoDamn I remember that one from way back, blew me away back then too. Functionality wise it's so faithful but with it's own twist on the aesthetic.
- amaccuish 7y agoUbuntu had a really cool demo for Unity on their site a while back (announcement [0]). It's been retired but the code is on Github [1] [0] https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-online-tour https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-online-tour [1] https://github.com/canonical-webteam-archive/tour.ubuntu.com https://github.com/canonical-webteam-archive/tour.ubuntu.com
- mycall 7y agoExcellent list. You have any favorites?
- syx 7y ago
- 4cao 7y agoNo matter how hard I try, can't find a way to trigger the BSoD. There must be a way, will keep looking. Edit: Seems it's supposed to crash on its own at random intervals for no apparent reason. It's really just like the original.
- mrighele 7y agoI clicked Corglitch and my Firefox became completely unresponsive. Somewhat close, I would say.
- 4cao 7y agoI managed to do that too (browser freezing until I closed the tab, also in Firefox) but there's supposed to be a proper BSoD. I found a screenshot of it: https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/windows_93_bsod.png https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/windows_9... (It's a stylized "Error 404: The page is missing or was never written. You can see if it becomes available again.")
- shantara 7y agoFound it! Open "/c/files/documents/keynotes/opening/" file and keep clicking on the next button (the triangle) until you reach the last page with "Windows 93. Are you ready?" text. Click on "Are you ready?"
- 7y ago
- smukherjee19 7y agoI found the Castle Gafa game... interesting, to say the least.
- aliswe 7y agoHonestly using this on a phone is not very far from the android ui.
- stuartd 7y agoOh, this takes me back a long time. I kept a game of Progress Quest open for far longer than I should have.
- alexdumitru 7y agoThis version of Minesweeper seems a bit hard to beat.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- SirLotsaLocks 7y agoIs there a current gen operating system that maintains this appearence style?
- pedrogpimenta 7y agoWell, several Desktop managers for Linux have old-school Windows-like themes. For example: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
- parasanti 7y agoDefrag works as expected.
- neogodless 7y agoI'm pretty upset that I couldn't outsmart the AI and win tic-tac-toe. I wrote some tic-tac-toe "AI" a while back, and it wasn't as good as this one. I could beat mine...
- gugagore 7y agoJust in case someone doesn't know better, there are fewer than 300k possible games of tic-tac-toe.
- splatcollision 7y agoThis is so superbad
- 72deluxe 7y agoI kind of miss how speedy and usable a desktop like this was. I remember running Windows 95 on 64MB RAM (even did it on 16MB, barely) on a 486 DX2 66MHz (it was something someone else had thrown out, in the era of Pentium IIs, I was poor). And then installing RedHat 6.0 from a magazine cover CD and using FVWM and wondering how I could make my feeble poor machine look like the glorious KDE2 and GNOME desktops gracing the pages of said magazine. I miss KDE2's look TBH.
- that_jojo 7y ago+1 for KDE2 love
- nitrogen 7y agoLong after I had switched to Linux, I helped my grandmother with Windows 95 on a 486 DX4 at 100MHz. I had completely forgotten how snappy a UI could be on modest hardware. Also KDE2 was indeed perfect. They had built all the features one needs in a desktop, and ever since everything has been half baked.
- 72deluxe 7y agoI liked KDE 3.5 as it had everything in it (Konqueror was useful with the protocols for SSH file transfer etc., it really did everything) but the KDE2 with the purpley CDE look was great. Not so keen on modern Linux UIs. They seem to be copying macos (not a bad thing) but I am using LXDE or XFCE these days. I remember Windows 95 being fast and able to keep up with keyboard shortcuts that you typed in a flurry. The modern systems can't. And in Windows 10, half of the metro apps and settings apps don't even have keyboard shortcuts. It's step back IMHO, and indicates that they were "designed" by users who only use the mouse.
- anthk 7y agoWell, with a bit of effort you could make FVWM look like this: http://ironphoenix.org/fvwm/configs/fvwm-desktop/fvwm-desktop.jpg http://ironphoenix.org/fvwm/configs/fvwm-desktop/fvwm-deskto... Best of two words, and it could run fast enough even under a 486.
- 7y ago
- amiantos 7y ago"Safari is teh new Internet Explorer" huh
- azinman2 7y agoEspecially since that’s chrome...
- jiofih 7y agoI find that quit upsetting since it’s clearly the authors choice to not support Safari and not any particular failure of the browser. It’s my goto browser for everyday surfing, fast, light and with great standards support.
- jachee 7y agoNot to mention energy conscious for when you're not attached to the grid.
- ShinTakuya 7y agoI can understand choosing not to support it. Safari is frustrating to web developers because you can't legally test on it without owning Apple hardware. Whereas Microsoft provides free virtual machines for testing on its browsers. I've done the same thing on my personal sites - I've outright blocked Safari with a message explaining that I won't unblock it until Apple provides a Safari VM.
- pugwash 7y agoThey used to provide builds of Safari and Webkit for Windows; people complained endlessly about the very fact of their existence. Apple stopped providing them. True story. Also, outright blocking Safari users is sort of obnoxious.
- ShinTakuya 7y agoSorry but that's not even remotely close to being the same. The Windows builds were notoriously badly supported and were never equivalent from a debugging perspective. Microsoft made a genius move by providing its IE VMs, and if Apple didn't want to force developers into its ecosystem they'd have done the same. I agree that it's obnoxious, but I'd rather do that than deal with Safari users complaining about bugs on my sites that I have no intention of buying a Mac or breaking the law to fix. I'd rather avoid the bug reports and let the users know that it's Apple fixing it. The sites I run are entirely free and paid for out of my own pocket anyway, so I don't want my money going towards people who support Safari. I've considered blocking Chrome, too, for other reasons.
- dfee 7y agoOpen “Solitude” click “Game” -> “Yeah” and follow the instructions. You won’t be disappointed. > click and drag anywhere on the game to see the fun, thanks to mr doob
- mshockwave 7y agoI like the Half-life 3
- grawprog 7y agoAhaha this is great, the laggy emulator, the unwinnable minesweeper, the horrible delays caused by a system full of spyware and garbage. The desktop seemed maybe a little bit too clean though, there wasn't icons half off the screen or hidden entirely and it lacked the random files typically placed or saved there because if it's not on the desktop it doesn't exist.
- tartoran 7y agoThis is quite impressive, I played with PukeData and it works quite well. And the maze3d in ascii is quite brilliant too though I find it quite hard, everything looks the same. And the Halflife 3 is mocking me, it appears to be loading but keeps on initializing silly stuff like VR Pizza, etc..
- A_No_Name_Mouse 7y agoMy favorite site for when a colleague forgot to lock his PC. Win93, put the browser in full screen mode and it looks like the PC has been haunted or hacked. Took some of them minutes to find out what was going on, especially because the programs are functional.
- unnouinceput 7y agoHalf-Life 3....confirmed That one cracked me and my boy. Awesome.
- thinkloop 7y agoAll the apps work, this must have taken forever, there's a full solitaire game, ms paint, etc. each one not that easy to do in JS, well done. I wonder why? It's a lot more than a proof-of-concept or prototype.
- fireattack 7y agoText rendering seems off. Some are clear but some are very blurry: https://i.imgur.com/G2lyFEY.png https://i.imgur.com/G2lyFEY.png Is this intentional or just a bug?
- benibela 7y agoI do not know, but I have another font problem https://i.imgur.com/VwMWcOm.png https://i.imgur.com/VwMWcOm.png
- jonnycomputer 7y agoOS in a browser, and its snappy.
- vcoelho 7y agoWow, I don't know how I just missed modern browsers being able to run Game Boy emulators.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoModern browsers can emulate Windows 95, which is a significantly more involved feat than emulating a GB.
- dwild 7y agoThey have been able to do it for the past 15 years! I remember I had a bunch of emulators that were running in Applet and Flash to play games on a school computer using a browser. I guess emulators in JS are more recent, but I have no doubt a Game Boy one would have run a decade ago at least.
- ryanmercer 7y agoAre you trying to get me fired? I started playing solitaire and was like wait, you're at work dummy.
- sterlind 7y agoMad props for running completely smooth on Firefox Preview for Android. Drag to select, double click, window resize, everything just works perfectly. Why can't modern SPAs work as well?
- virgil_disgr4ce 7y ago> Why can't modern SPAs work as well Some do
- ficklepickle 7y agoVery true. The ones that don't, I don't know what their excuse is. Maybe they thought they would add performance later. Maybe they pulled in dependencies willy-nilly without truly understanding the problem space. Maybe it's a result of the frantic rush to add features. Somehow it has become acceptable to keep users waiting for multiple seconds. It's crazy and often unnecessary. For example, I just built a trivia game PWA[0]. >1MB in size, including ~30 SVG illustrations. 7kb per game. Writing offline mode now, it will add ~1.45mb but only once, at "install" time. It's only MVP but it's already fast. Whatever the cause, it makes me very frustrated as a user and front ender.
- kempbellt 7y agoVery cool. Technology has come far. Sidenote: Is it just me, or is the minesweeper game designed to make you lose every time?
- topaz0 7y agoI managed to beat it on intermediate.
- smilekzs 7y agoHow?
- DangitBobby 7y agoIt's not just you. The original minesweeper generates mines after your first click so it can ensure you will not lose on the first click. This version seems to instead make sure a mine is always under your cursor after the first click. I love it.
- PatrolX 7y agoSo good, so very very good!
- jasoneckert 7y agoThis website has totally destroyed my productivity for the day. Thanks for that! :D
- calmconviction 7y agoDoes anyone remember the address to a website that loaded basically a full blown VM of a random vintage OS? This reminded me of that and I've been wracking my brain to try to remember it
- mpoteat 7y agoSearch for Fabrice Bellard.
- mcdevilkiller 7y agoYes, this is it. He ported (and created) Qemu to JS using Emscriptem and we can run differen OSes inside the browser. So cool!
- dbg31415 7y agoLotta memories here. Thanks.
- ebeip90 7y agoWeird quirk, but it seems that MineSweeper / BrianSweeper always places a mine in the upper-right corner. I usually start here, and 30 games in a row it had a mine in that position.
- AndrewOMartin 7y agoDid you try every other space 30 times in a row?
- zackkitzmiller 7y agoThere's always a mine no matter where you click first.
- netsharc 7y agoI put a flag on a random square as a first move, and clicked the square next to it, I didn't die!
- marcosdumay 7y agoSkiFree will show a pop-up saying the program is not responding, and after you close it, show another one...
- TallGuyShort 7y agoI think it's a reference to the Bad Luck Brian meme.
- Spoppys 7y agoIn the options there is a "troll mode" you can turn off, if you actually want to play
- lichenwarp 7y agoWhere is Visual Basic 6 enterprise when you're 13.
- benibela 7y agoI had Delphi then
- lichenwarp 7y agoJust saw this now, I wanted to switch but couldn't get my head around it and what I was used to.
- Yhippa 7y agoDoom works!
- DerWOK 7y agoMost fun was: launching Brain Sweeper! ROFL!!1!
- Emendo 7y agoThis reminds me of a browser based computing environment demo (I believe it was WebOS or MyWebTop) in the late 1990s. We have indeed come a long way in the last 20 years.
- ryanmercer 7y agoOops, lenna.png is definitely NSFW.
- ouid 7y agoalways upvote windows93
- ngold 7y agoHalf life 3 confirmed windows 93 exclusive
- MayeulC 7y agoDoesn't work in a private browsing window on Firefox. It could be that local storage is disabled, IIRC?
- weci2i 7y agoWas this inspired by Windows RG (https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/winrg https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/winrg) ? It is obviously way more impressive but I’m surprised nobody else has mentioned it.
- tehlike 7y agoI forgot defrag was a thing. Whenever computer felt slow, run it to have your placebo.
- bastawhiz 7y agoLooking at the console, it's disappointing to see it trying to connect to (the now defunct) Coinhive
- interweb 7y agoOne of my favorite pieces of software art! Jankenpopp and Zombectro are awesome artists... http://jankenpopp.com/ http://jankenpopp.com/ http://zombect.ro/ http://zombect.ro/
- nojvek 7y agoShould remove the closing animations. They break the nostalgia. lol! lena and virtual girl. You do realize there are women on this site right? may be have it a bit less bro-ey ?
- signaru 7y agoAmazing! It would be fun if they could somehow integrate jspaint.app which is a very close replica of 90s MS Paint.
- timplant 7y agoThinking of days when I was a student playing wolfenstein 3d...