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Windows98 Running in the Browser
- tectonic 6y agoSee also: https://github.com/jsdf/pce https://github.com/jsdf/pce
- Commodore_64 6y agoHell yeah! Now I can play jazz jackrabbit in firefox!
- umvi 6y agoI wanted to play Chip's Challenge, but it's too slow on my Chromebook
- MauranKilom 6y agoWait, where do you find that?
- EvanAnderson 6y agoBoots the QNX demo disk[1]. Pretty cool! Sadly, it does not detect the emulated PCI NE2000 NIC. [1] http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
- keyle 6y agoImpressive! But loading Google for kicks, in IE, sort of killed it. Definitely can feel the nostalgia. I remember the first time I decided to leave Windows 95 run overnight, the next morning, moving the mouse would send the harddrive playhead flying like crazy... You know the old "SHRrrrrt Shrrrt..." It had such a memory leak overnight that moving the mouse was causing the swap to kick in non-stop!
- WantonQuantum 6y agoInteresting. In 1997 I had a thinkpad running Windows 95 and I went weeks between reboots. It was rock solid.
- toast0 6y agoWindows 95/98 stability really depended on the quality of your hardware, drivers, and software. If things intracted poorly, it was easy to get a system that needed a reboot every few hours to stay responsive.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoAgreed. Drivers were a big one. As I remember, they had unfettered access to everything... so they could consume all ram or cpu or read any part of memory. Powerful and scary.
- londons_explore 6y agoIn pretty much all systems today drivers can do the same...
- hyperman1 6y agoIn win95, everything had access to everything if it wanted. E.g. DLLs were mapped in a shared memory segment that was shared between all applications. Lots of 16 bit code was still running, and this did IPC basically by messing in some other program's memory. Backward compatibilitty required very thin walls between processes. DOS TSR programs started before windows were still running. I had one that popped up a calculator in dos text mode, and if you pushed its hotkey in win95, it switched win95 back to text mode, paused win95, did its thing, then popped back in win95. Only the very basics of protected mode and virtual memory where there, and a well-behaving program had a reasonable chance of staying in its own sandbox. But only because it wanted to. Seen from the CPU, you could argue EMM386 was more the actual OS than win95/win98. None of this is meant to be negative. It was a solid step up from windows 3.x, and yet quite usable with 4MB RAM of which the first 1MB wanted a very different treatment.
- II2II 6y agoI used to joke that Windows 95 hated me more than I hated it, since it managed to "uninstall itself" within a couple of weeks. (For some reason, there was massive data corruption.) The odd part is that the computer was perfectly reliable under DOS/Windows 3.1, Linux, and OS/2. The quality of drivers could be a serious problem in the Windows 95 era. If it was a driver shipped with Windows, everything seemed to work fine. If the driver was provided by the vendor, the reliability was so inconsistent that I would try to find a compatible driver that shipped with Windows even if it meant missing out on some features.
- lewiscollard 6y agoAwww, "My Briefcase"! I had totally forgotten that was a thing :) What a nice little nostalgia trip.
- lostgame 6y agoOmigosh, I really miss the heck out of when Windows had charm, and personality like this. Stuff like Hover! - getting that Weezer music video with the Happy Days set on the Win 95 media edition or whatever...such cool little things that displayed a sense of ‘fun’ about very business-centric software.
- Geezus_42 6y agoHover!!! hover.io
- Geezus_42 6y agoNvm, apparently they shutdown the web version... :(
- netsharc 6y agoMy Pentium 100 could play this 320x240 video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc fullscreen with no choppiness. I had forgotten about this video until I saw it last year... But Windows had skeumorphisms, even nowadays the screen with everything minimised is called "the desk[ ]top". But I guess briefcases and recycle bins made things relatable...
- square_usual 6y agoAs an 8 year old child, I never understood what briefcases were but that didn't prevent me from having tons of them.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoI used win98 regularly back then. Never touched briefcases. I’m not sure it was too popular.
- beamatronic 6y agoIs it public domain now?
- orionblastar 6y agoNo, but it is no longer supported by Microsoft so it is abandonware. It is still closed source and piracy to copy without permission but Microsoft does not care about it because it is too old to sue over.
- chungy 6y agoThey've been known to send C&Ds to various sites that host old versions like this. "no longer supported" is a flimsy argument for abandonware anyway. by that reasoning, Windows 7 is abandonware and it still runs basically every Windows program ever.
- lostgame 6y agoI think that kind of boils down to the ‘spirit of the law’ kinda thing. Windows 98, conversely; cannot run modern software, and the majority of software in use for the last decade - it is only going to be installed as an experiment by geeks like us, for the most part.
- quickthrower2 6y agoArguably anything using Windows 98 is satire. :-)
- mschuster91 6y agoFor what it's worth, a Berlin court used Windows 95 (!) until Fall 2019, and I wish I were joking here. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/experten-warnten-schon-2017-it-katastrophe-am-berliner-kammergericht-kam-mit-ansage/25163810.html https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/experten-warnten-schon-20...
- 6y ago
- backzerman 6y agoomg finally a reasonable minesweeper emulator
- throwaway888abc 6y ago:) Check the javascript replica https://codepen.io/joelbyrd/pen/hdHKF https://codepen.io/joelbyrd/pen/hdHKF
- kyberias 6y agoBad imitation. Doesn't support the all-important right-mouse+left-mouse click combination.
- steerablesafe 6y agoCheck out minesweeper X, it was (is?) used by the competitive minesweeper scene (yes, it was a thing). http://www.minesweeper.info/downloads/MinesweeperX.html http://www.minesweeper.info/downloads/MinesweeperX.html
- matsemann 6y agoBut doubleclicking a number to remove knowns doesn't work? Or didn't it work in the 95 version?
- kej 6y agoOff-topic tangent, but if you like Minesweeper you would really like the games Hexcells and Tametsi, each available for less than $1 on Steam. They're both like Minesweeper but have the improvement that every move can be logically deduced so you never have to guess.
- lxe 6y agoPlugging Fabrice Bellard's https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/ where you can run linux and windows on a hand crafted js x86 emulator.
- dleslie 6y agoOf course it was Bellard. Of course.
- giantDinosaur 6y agoThe challenge is to find something he made that isn't in some way impressive.
- alvarelle 6y agoThe graphical design of his website?
- numlock86 6y agoThere is no design so there is nothing to judge about.
- rosstex 6y agoI'd just like to remark that every comment on this thread came from a different person. I love HN.
- saagarjha 6y agoWe can judge him for his design, which is to consciously choose to not focus on design :)
- chii 6y agothat's the design - it looks nice and clean, and no extraneous bullshit.
- 6y ago
- subhashp 6y agoAmazing!
- FillardMillmore 6y agoWow, what a flashback! This was the OS I actually grew up with. I remember being 3 or 4 years old and playing Carnivores 2 on my Dad's Windows 98 PC. Even the slowness and unresponsiveness is there, just like I remember! Yeah...this was the golden age. So much hope and so much optimism for what could be in regards to technology and what it would allow for the general population. I still think we're not there, but we can get there still, perhaps.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoThis was really interesting to read. Thanks for sharing your memory. There was a big difference between win98 and win98 “second edition”. Do you know which you used?
- FillardMillmore 6y agoUnfortunately I don't remember. :( Back then, I wasn't so much interested in the computer itself as I was in what I could do with it - as a four year old, that meant hunting and killing pixelated T-Rexes.
- intruder 6y agoYep, it makes me so nostalgic. If you like this, there's a channel on twitch streaming old episodes of Computer Chronicles [1] and the optimism and excitement in it is something I just don't feel anymore nowadays. [1] https://www.twitch.tv/computerchronicles https://www.twitch.tv/computerchronicles
- cobalt 6y agowas Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 & later 2 for me
- hnlmorg 6y ago> this was the golden age. So much hope and so much optimism for what could be Funny that because I grew up in the 80s and for me the golden age was 10 to 15 years earlier and I saw Windows 98 as the decline. There was so much variety and experimentation in the 80s, and so much excitement too when GUIs first started appearing on home computers. There was also much more diversity in the computing landscape with different hardware architectures and operating systems. In fact back then DOS machines were some of the least interesting hardware and early Windows (pre 3.x) was just terrible compared to what Acorn, Atari, Amiga and Apple were doing. Then came the mid-90s and everything had converged into x86 running Windows. I remember at the time feeling rather let down by just how boring and crummy desktop computing had become considering all the interesting things that preceded it. Things picked up again once I discovered BeOS and Linux -- I guess even in the 90s I didn't like Microsoft Windows and to be honest little has changed over the years. That's just my opinion though. The "golden age" is a very subjective thing that I suspect is largely driven by the age of the observer.
- kdamica 6y agoI immediately played Freecell, which I spent way too many hours playing as a kid.
- vishwajeetv 6y agoWhat interests me is the core interactions with Windows systems remain mostly the same, unchanged, in the span of last 20 years!
- ToFab123 6y agoIsn't the same true for osx and linux?
- phendrenad2 6y ago> osx Between architecture changes (PowerPC to x86 to x86-64 and next up ARM), and compiler changes (I doubt Objective-C code written for OS X 1.0 will compile on the latest XCode), breaking API changes, security changes, and even deprecating standards (can't use latest OpenGL, you gotta use Metal)... not really.
- saagarjha 6y agoDepends on how complicated it was. I can assure you that your simple GUI still mostly works as those classes came from NeXT and aren’t going anywhere soon.
- ben509 6y agoI'll propose a test for whether it's true. We'll try writing instructions to a non-technical user how to perform some tasks. Then, we shouldn't know exactly which version they're using, only "I'm using OS X" or "I'm using Ubuntu." If they can reasonably muddle their way through the tasks without knowing the OS version, the OS's have remained consistent. Example tasks would be, "run a program," "find a file on disk," "save your work," "copy and paste between applications," "close a window." Examples that would often fail include updating configuration settings or manipulating disks. These are important tasks, but not core tasks. Restricting Linux to the mass market distros, my limited experience is they've been reasonably consistent. They can probably use Win-R to run a program. These distros mostly use the ZXCV clipboard keys, and adopt other Windows-like conventions like Ctrl-S to save and clicking an X to close a window. Some Linux distros could fail some reasonable tasks because of poor design; e.g. I recall Ubuntu's tiny hitbox for resizing windows being very annoying. On OS X / macOS, Apple has chaned things up with features like autosave, which fundamentally changed how some applications behave. But according to my test, I'd just tell the person, "hit command S" and while it will create a new revision instead of saving the file, this doesn't do a thing we don't want. I think the biggest lack of core consistency is in Electron apps and other non-native UI creeping in. I don't think I'd pin that on OS designers, though.
- btashton 6y agoFirst think I had to do was see if Active Desktop worked... And yes it does. "View My Active Desktop as a web page", I guess Windows 98 was just ahead of its time.
- jose-cl 6y agosheep.exe <3
- Nursie 6y agoMight be of interest then - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/esheep-64bit/9mx2v0tqt6rm?activetab=pivot:overviewtab https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/esheep-64bit/9mx2v0tqt6rm?... eSheep 64! (I haven't tried it)
- hestefisk 6y agoThis is brilliant. Even the goold old Windows --> Run ... -> CON/CON bug seems to work.
- hestefisk 6y agoPing localhost works as well. Now to see if you can kill the machine by causing a ICMP packet buffer overflow.
- renewiltord 6y agoThis is beautiful and pure nostalgia fever.
- reddotX 6y agoStart -> Run -> aux/aux
- nabaraz 6y agoI tried unsuccessfully to load Windows98 (via same link) in the Internet Explorer. Inception!
- dariosalvi78 6y agoWould myself in 2000 believe that I would be running Windows 98 in a mobile phone, emulated in a browser?
- brittspace 6y agoGiven that 2000 was the time of Windows CE on the Compaq iPAQ H3100 [1] ... no, probably not :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ
- timvdalen 6y agoWow, I can't believe how smooth that is. I've got to say, the icon for .txt files brought on some very specific hit of nostalgia.
- hyko 6y agoShame we're limited to 16 colors...miss those title bar gradients :D Was this the pinnacle of UI design, or is nostalgia clouding our judgment?
- emilsedgh 6y agoIt was very usable. Performed incredibly well. And was boring as hell. I think it's the latter issue that drove it to it's doom.
- jfrunyon 6y agoManagement says: Easily usable interface with almost no confusion: bad, looks ugly. Barely usable interface with barely discernible elements: good, looks modern.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoI wish it were only management that thought that way, but it seems like a lot of developers genuinely believe it too.
- ptx 6y agoI think the pinnacle must have been before the title bar gradients were added. They always annoyed me: is the title bar any less of a title bar towards the right? No? Then why does it fade out?
- steerablesafe 6y agoTo be fair the colors were configurable and you could easily get rid of the gradient. Remember doing that, but I'm not sure if it was win98.
- ptx 6y agoYup. Windows 95 had a solid color and Windows 98 added the gradient. You could set both colors to the same one to make it solid again.
- b3lvedere 6y agoNice. Even the old /con/con bug still works :) -edit- sorry about that, was already mentioned previously :)
- mongojunction 6y agoThis is really amazing and takes me back. Very funny seeing it on such a small format in the top right corner. Makes me think a "Windows 98" PWA on mobile would be super funny. Unfortunately the windows sound wave file doesn't make any sound in the browser. I guess this is because a Soundcard or Speaker is not emulated.
- max_ 6y agoHypothetical question: If you where a program running in the VM how would you know if you are in one?
- alrex021 6y agoIs that you Elon? ;-)
- benbristow 6y agoThere's ways. Detecting whether tools like VMWare/Virtualbox are installed, whether certain drivers are installed, checking the hardware listings etc. etc. Malware is quite a good study subject about this question. There's a lot of malware that won't run if it's in a virtual machine to avoid researchers from testing it inside one.
- saagarjha 6y agoAnd games, which these days employ tactics similar to malware.
- brittspace 6y agoDo you have a reference that is runnable in this emulator? (Genuinely curious.)
- Retr0spectrum 6y agohttps://github.com/LordNoteworthy/al-khaser#anti-virtualization--full-system-emulation https://github.com/LordNoteworthy/al-khaser#anti-virtualizat... https://github.com/AlicanAkyol/sems https://github.com/AlicanAkyol/sems (dunno if these would build/run on win98 though)
- csunbird 6y agoSo, running a Windows VM inside a Windows VM is the safest option?
- derefr 6y agoAnd is there VM software used for malware research, that employs counter-countermeasures, e.g. generating drivers with randomized names/IDs; randomizing the hypercall op for the VM and then rewriting the deployed drivers to use that op; etc? Or, are there modes for emulators like qemu/bochs, where they'll run entirely with "real" (LLE-emulated) hardware?
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoThe Hindu’s got it wrong... It’s JavaScript libraries all the way down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
- MrBuddyCasino 6y agoBack when the system settings could be reached with less clicks, were organised in a logical way and didn't use most of the screen as white-space.
- nolok 6y agoYou mean before windows tried to be designed as a a tablet OS while being on desktop for 8.0, failed on both as easily predicted, and then refused to admit the mistake ever since beside the one mandatory change of adding a normal start button / menu back? That full screen start view was one hell of an abomination....
- arethuza 6y agoThat tablet interface also made it to the server version - which probably had the worst windows interface ever.
- kjaftaedi 6y agoPersonally I've always been slightly amazed that at no point in time did anyone at Microsoft think that making msn.com the default homepage for servers was a bad idea.
- jychang 6y agoHilariously, Microsoft production servers are also set to the MSN default homepage, even though most forests are firewalled off from the entire internet. So the homepage doesn't even load.
- giantDinosaur 6y agoNot loading is surely preferable.
- netsharc 6y ago
- csomar 6y agoHere is something that I stumbled upon that I think was a big loss: HTML Help [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help] It's unfortunate that Microsoft didn't work toward making it an open source standard for documentation. We'd have avoided every other documentation having it's own format, style, etc... Plus you get the whole documentation in a single file, not worrying about broken stuff, missing images, broken links, etc...
- nolok 6y agoThink about how screwed up the modern web is (both security wise and complexity / bloat wise), and then realize if the format hadn't evolved to include all of that then help designer would still go with their own thing. I'm a huge chm fan but I for one don't want out of update electron apps to open everytime I look up something. And then they would still go online to find up to date stuff anyway.
- nabla9 6y agoAre you kidding me? It was not unfortunate. Microsoft was the biggest opponent of open formats. MS tried completely shut down and end open internet based on open standards. Their Blackbird project attempted to make create completely closed alternative MSN (The Microsoft Network) with closed publishing, search and software. Instead of Wikipedia, we would check out things from Microsoft Encarta.
- exhilaration 6y agoInstead of Wikipedia, we would check out things from Microsoft Encarta. It's funny you bring that up. I just noticed yesterday that MS Word now has a Wikipedia button: https://imgur.com/a/zbcLZGj https://imgur.com/a/zbcLZGj Things change!
- newsbinator 6y agoI remember when you could bypass the login prompt and open a web browsing session by going to HTML Help. If I recall correctly you could run executables from the resulting browser's address bar too.
- rightbyte 6y agoIt's funny how I find Win98 more user friendly and logical than Win10. Just look at the start menu where thing are sorted in folders. No ads optimizations anywhere. Just an annoying shortcut on the desktop for MS Internet. Is it possible to make a program like the sheep.exe nowadays? It is awesome.
- akx 6y agoMore likely than not, sheep.exe still works perfectly on a Windows 10 box (at least if it happens to be 32-bit). Microsoft's backward compatibility is still pretty impressive.
- neilsimp1 6y agoI just searched, apparently you can get the "updated" version from the MS Store: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/esheep-64bit/9mx2v0tqt6rm?activetab=pivot:overviewtab https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/esheep-64bit/9mx2v0tqt6rm?...
- mrlala 6y agoHonestly how often does anyone use the start menu these days? I am on windows all day long for analysis/development, anything I actually use is just pinned to the taskbar (like osx). And when I do have to use the start menu to find something like newly installed.. not sure how you really think it's that different than win98? The left part is the same thing, it's just sorted alphabetically by program names etc.. and in theory now instead you just start typing for search instead of looking. Overall calling win98 more user friendly than win10 sounds ludicrous, unless you are someone who never actually uses windows..
- aronpye 6y agoHas it crashed for anyone yet? I tried using Windows Update and it hung, it’s Windows 98 alright.
- zuppy 6y agoyou can crash it with the /con/con commad too edit: for the ones who haven't lived the windows 95-98 era: https://coderanch.com/t/131585/engineering/Folder-con-Windows-invalid#639965 https://coderanch.com/t/131585/engineering/Folder-con-Window...
- thamer 6y agoHow to get a BSOD: 1. Open Start Menu 2. Click "Run" 3. Type: con\con and press enter
- izietto 6y agoTo me, still the best UI/UX OS experience. That menu organization is just perfect. Everything is crystal clear about what is selected or not. No idea why the OS moved from this layout.
- znpy 6y agoyes. in my opinion though, windows 2000 was the pinnacle. it had the user experience of windows 98 but was also a lot more stable.
- izietto 6y agoActually I've never used Windows 2000, I went straight to Windows XP, whose UI was already too bloated (many colors, gradient buttons, ...)
- 0xffff2 6y agoBut at least XP would let you switch back to Windows 2000 look and feel. The eye candy was just that, and easily removed. When Windows 7 rolled around I spent years being mad that it was no longer possible to have a Windows 2000 style UI in unmodified Windows. I recently set my desktop to the Windows 2000 default blue background color just for a bit of nostalgia. As far as I can tell, it's the only bit of Win 2000 UI that it's still possible to achieve.
- jokoon 6y agoDoes anybody have a reasonable explanation why windows 10 requires a SSD and so much ram? I wish a kernel engineer could give a good answer to that question. One side of the answer could be that the software that is bigger, but honestly that doesn't explain everything. I wish somebody could confirm Wirth's law is real and that there are valid example of it.
- longtom 6y agoMost likely explanation: Bad engineers getting into high positions via connections, elbows or peter principle.
- Nursie 6y agoDoes it require an SSD? I've seen it working on a couple of older, non-SSD machines. But "working" is perhaps a strong term.
- matsemann 6y agoIs it bad that it requires much ram? I mean, as long as it's utilized well I don't really mind?
- gridlockd 6y agoThe question is, what is it actually doing that requires that much RAM? Is it being utilized well? The experience of using the actual operating system isn't that far away from Windows 98, which ran on a few megabytes of RAM.
- dm319 6y agoThe same trend can be seen with linux distributions. A lot is surely down to composited window management. There's also things that we didn't run as services back in Windows 98 days - network capabilities, bluetooth, low power states, file hashing for quick search, assistants and other ways of rapidly finding and launching programs, auto updates, telemetry, automatic mounting of connected devices. EDIT: and in the case of Windows 10, adverts/trialware and their associated animations.
- eeereerews 6y agoFirefox/Linux: the cursor constantly tracks to the left. You have to push the mouse to the right to keep it still. Works in Chromium though.
- 0xffff2 6y agoFirefox 77.0.1/Ubuntu 18.04: No mouse drift for me.
- thanato0s 6y agoI won winmine on win98 in a browser. My 14 years old me would have never believed me. That's why I made a screenshot.
- _trampeltier 6y agoNow you have a VM in a browser on a cellphone. And my cellphone still have sometimes problems on so many pages because they are so bloated. A full OS does load faster then so many website ..
- muterad_murilax 6y agoFor the love of God, please fix the title already! (Missing a space.)
- fredley 6y agoI can hear the sound when the hourglass appears. You know the one I mean (if you're old enough).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- danfritz 6y agoHa the beauty of calling defrag.exe and hoping your pc would run faster after it. So relaxing to see blue block move around (with the occasional horror of a red block indicating an error)
- noisy_boy 6y agoI like the offline-Dropbox aka My Briefcase. God I hated that app for no good reason.
- dirtyid 6y agoKind of miss how... unified the design language was back then. I've resorted to making custom icons for my taskbar because ever app suit has their own clashing identity. That's after inconsistencies in Win10 intself.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoTried to visit yahoo.com and IE crashed.
- jordache 6y agoYep! I did too. I thought this may be a good cross-browser test tool
- sevencolors 6y agoI think because this is a stock install and needs a network connection setup first. Mine "crashes" too but then another window loads to setup MSN Good times!
- thom 6y agoFor even more fractal nostalgia, please be aware that in those days you could still run 'progman.exe' if you so desired. Sadly this install doesn't include QBasic which was also still available on these DOS based Windows versions.
- rory_h_r 6y agoWindows98 with the best version of Solitaire. Those were the days.
- turdnagel 6y agoIE is crashing for me whenever I try to load any site.
- classified 6y agoWon't that provoke a DMCA takedown request and a subsequent lawsuit from Microsoft?
- notriddle 6y agoMaybe a DMCA takedown notice... But a lawsuit? Why would Microsoft care enough to launch a lawsuit?
- historyremade 6y agoSteve Jobs used to love Windows XP. His desk had a PC which had XP.
- sirusdas 6y agoi am still unable to understand it, do you mean you are mounting the system in browser? how do you make sense of the bin and iso file in node and how exactly an os can run using V8 engine?