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A Windows 95-like shell for Windows 3.1x
- weikju 4y agoI used it back in 1995 when my PC couldn’t run Win95, and I had Win95-envy. It was really mind-blowing at the time to be able to change the UI of Windows like that. A little bit later I downloaded 20 or so Slackware floppies and the rest is history…
- rpastuszak 4y ago> I had Win95-envy Ha, I know the pain, I remember being 10 and (literally) dreaming about 16mb or RAM so I could install it!
- toast0 4y agoI think minimum was 4mb, and it ran ok with 8mb, although expect swapping if you multitask. It certainly ran nicer with 16mb, but you didn't need it.
- function_seven 4y agoI installed it on a 486 (DX2!!) with 4MB of RAM. It... worked, kinda. I reverted back to 3.1 a couple days later. The machine was just too slow. It would be another two years before I could afford something that could run 95. I think I went straight to 98 IIRC.
- borissk 4y agoDid you run Slackware from DOS or did you install it properly with a bootloader?
- weikju 4y agoProperly ran it with LILO as the boot loader. Shortly later the "boot from DOS" things started cropping up but I still preferred running them properly.
- fmakunbound 4y agoI hand totally forgotten about that. Wasn’t it called dosfs? It put metadata in files that would show up in DOS when you rebooted.
- LocalH 4y agoloadlin was the tool that would boot the kernel (including initrd) from a running DOS system. You might be thinking of umsdos? IIRC, that's the tool that would allow you to actually run Linux from a FAT partition (likely FAT16).
- Narishma 4y agoI remember having to boot my first distro from DOS because my sound card (a weird thing that was a combination of modem and sound card) didn't have Linux drivers. I would first load the DOS drivers, then boot Linux from DOS and it would then recognize it as a Sound Blaster.
- lathiat 4y agoMe too :) I remember that apparently for desktop applications icons to work it had to launch a process just to be each icon so was quite memory intensive. I seem to recall it also requiring “win32s” My machine would throw a text mode confirmation prompt over the win95 graphical installer when it tried to write the boot sector as boot sector virus protection and this would freeze the system so windows 95 installation never worked.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoSame but I got Slackware off a Computer Shopper cover CD ;-)
- sedatk 4y agoI wrote a similar shell that ran on DOS in 1994. It was called Baston. It won the 1st place award in a programming contest organized by Microsoft and PC World Magazine in Turkey. I was 18 back then. Here are a couple screenshots: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/241217/159136746-e05f6e95-eaca-4dc3-9dcd-ddd7aa2a0478.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/241217/159136746-e... https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/241217/159136763-e8ed9e4d-1e0b-4727-8c07-2ec82a890d9a.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/241217/159136763-e...
- hvs 4y agoNice. A Motif-style DOS shell. Looks good.
- sedatk 4y agoThanks! I didn't know it was called Motif, I'd only seen screenshots of workstations in UnixWorld magazine, and I'd loved the Motif style the most. There were also OpenLook and NextSTEP screenshots in the issues I had :)
- e-_pusher 4y agoThe design really looks solid - do you remember where you drew inspirations from? Cok guzel, helal olsun :)
- sedatk 4y agoYes, a couple issues of UnixWorld magazine my brother had given me. I saw the workstation screenshots and was so enamored with them that I was obsessed with writing a GUI library. That was how FatalVision was born very briefly. I was specifically impressed with how cool OSF/Motif windows looked hence the look I picked here. https://github.com/ssg/fatalvision https://github.com/ssg/fatalvision ve tesekkurler :)
- therein 4y agoNice to see `ssg` here. :) - Another Turkish expat living in the same city as you do
- timbit42 4y agoWPS4WIN is the OS/2 WorkPlace Shell for Windows 3.1x. Much nicer than the Win95 shell, in my opinion. It looks like this: http://toastytech.com/guis/wps.html http://toastytech.com/guis/wps.html
- BobMcBob 4y agoAs someone that ran it for over a year, before getting a Win95 box, I don't disagree. But at the end of the day, it was still Win3.1x under the hood. Win95 was bloated at the time, sure, but after the first service pack I thought it was a huge improvement.
- hankman86 4y agoI bought the Windows 95 update disk on the day of release. Only then to find that it made my Pentium 60 and 8 MB of RAM unbearably slow. In hindsight, Windows 95 was the OS to skip, Windows 98 was the one to go for.
- HeckFeck 4y agoThis looks to be quite the achievement, with numerous custom UI controls written just for the project. The author describes them here http://www.calmira.net/source/index.htm http://www.calmira.net/source/index.htm and offers them for anyone else to use. They include labels, paths, loading bars, even a Win95 style Pie chart. There are also UI hooks and messaging components. All this written in Delphi and designed to run atop the humble Windows 3.1 kernel! Source code is available should anyone wish to hack away.
- game-of-throws 4y agoIf this could run on Windows 11, I'd install it in a heartbeat.
- cmeacham98 4y agoThere are win95-esque themes for win10 at the very least. There's probably some for win11 too (or maybe there's enough in common the skins could work for both?)
- seritools 4y agoWhen it comes to the task bar, the closest to it might be RetroBar: https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar
- 72deluxe 4y agoAnother alternative (to get a usable taskbar back without grouping of icons etc.) is https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher.
- visiblink 4y agoYou can re-skin both the start button and taskbar with Classic Shell / Open-Shell too. My Windows 10 is skinned to look like the old Windows Embedded theme.
- signaru 4y agoMy bad for misunderstanding as "running directly" instead of porting. Anyway, I don't have Win 11 yet, but winedvm that runs 16bit apps on 64bit Windows might get you there. Although from what I remember running Calmira on 32bit Windows is a trippy experience.
- mx7zysuj4xew 4y agoHow on god's green earth is a 30 year old operating system more customizable and user-friendly than any of the modern interfaces (that includes both windows 10 and gnome)
- RedShift1 4y agoGod don't get me started, I've really come to hate how Windows 10 looks. I come from a time where 8 extra bits of color depth cost you an arm and a leg (1,5 arms and 2 legs adjusted for inflation) and you were willing to fight a war for 5 extra pixels of screen real estate. Anti-aliasing was just a dream. Now we have full HD screens with 32 bit colors and HDR, powerful GPUs to draw edges as smooth AF and what did we decide to do with all of that? Use 4 colors, fill it up with whitespace and cram everything into squares. I think the Windows 10 UI was created by a group of depressed people and it really shows.
- grepfru_it 4y agoMeanwhile I upgraded (downgraded?) from Neon to windows 11 on one of my laptops. On more than one occasion I assumed I was using KDE plasma. Firefox renders basically the same between the two, all of my apps run on windows and Linux (steam, VLC, etc).. it’s the nuance in notifications that threw me into uncanny valley. Also made me realize the two things that I need from a desktop are a solid notification system (kde is ok, I like how it’s done in windows 11 and on macOS) and a smooth mouse experience. Everything in the UI is just a skin and can be emulated or replaced
- nikanj 4y agoThe Windows 11 UI is telling the same people ”now imagine everyone has a tablet”. You’ll likely get some pushback along the lines of ”We already tried that with Windows 8 and everyone hated it”, but keep pushing - quote something about Henry Ford and horses if neccessary
- grishka 4y agoMicrosoft keeps trying really hard to make touchscreens happen. Except they aren't going to happen. It's a desktop OS for mice and keyboards first and foremost, it's about time they acknowledge that by designing everything with these input devices in mind.
- etaioinshrdlu 4y agoI want to run it in Wine and use it as a daily driver. Apparently Wine does have support for Win16, but I doubt it works on modern systems for various reasons.
- borissk 4y agoI remember running Netscape Navigator on W4WG 3.11. For some reason the 16 bit version was many times slower than the 32 bit one for Win NT.
- dvhh 4y agoThere is a lot of workaround when you are working with segments of 64kb addressable memory space.
- pugworthy 4y agoNow if we only had a CP/M shell inside a Windows 95 shell running on Windows 3.1. Like an OS without PID to keep it from oscillating wildly.
- BobMcBob 4y agoBack in the day, when I was but a young teen, sad that I couldn't afford Win95 when it first came out (or run it THAT well on a 486DX2/66mhz & 4MB RAM). Stuck with Win3.11 I looked for other things I could run, that didn't involve me nuking the PC and installing Slackware or otherwise distrupt the "Family PC's" main use; running Lotus 123 for my mother's home accounting business. So what I found was something that could mimic a "modern" OS, but that still offered 100% of the compatibility, that even an accounting parent could stomach. IBM Workplace Shell for Windows 3.1x: https://winworldpc.com/product/ibm-workplace-shell/151 https://winworldpc.com/product/ibm-workplace-shell/151 I found it on either the early web, or on a shareware BBS, but the purpose was the same; to convince someone to please, for the love of god, buy IBM OS/2 (not even OS/2 Warp!) I sure as hell didn't care or want OS/2, but boy did it make my slowly falling behind Win3.11 PC look like the cool kids with their brand new spaceheater Pentiums. I occasionally reflect back on that time and sorta miss those days, and that computer.. but then I remember it was a Packard Bell sunday flier special "package deal" purchased at Circuit City by a clueless parent in the early 90s, and I was lucky it lasted 4 years before the motherboard blew up and was sent to the recycler. Of course the 2 PSUs, and 3 HDDs dying in that time should have been a hint.
- hankman86 4y agoI remember this one. Must have been IBMs last ditch attempt to make people move over to OS/2.
- santoshalper 4y agoI think the 486/66 would probably have been ok for Windows 95, but the 4MB of ram would have been rough.
- int_19h 4y agoFor Win95, it was tolerable. Win98 with IE integration everywhere (remember "Active Desktop"?) was much more of a memory hog tho.
- BobMcBob 4y agoI can tell you from first hand experience it was. 4mb was the minimum requirements and I can tell you, that legally MS was correct in that statement. When I eventually did get a copy of Win95 plus Update (SP1 basicly), I ran it for exactly 1 week before I scraped together enough money to purchase another 8mb of RAM from Fry's. After that it was fine, at least until it blew itself up.
- billybuckwheat 4y agoBack in the late 90s, when I couldn't afford a newer computer and Linux wasn't an option for me, Calmira gave me an excuse to keep my PC running Windows 3.1 going. To be honest, I liked the combination of Calmira and Windows 3.1 better than Windows 95 and Windows 98. Great computing memories ...
- mysterydip 4y agoI love that it went so long as to have an XP and even longhorn/vista variant.
- poisonborz 4y agoWell, guess what: https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsmodding/comments/ttm0nr/the_windows_311_windows_11_theme_for_calmira_ii/ https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsmodding/comments/ttm0nr/the_...
- oxymoron 4y agoAside from the coolness of the actual thing, I love the early 00’s web site design. For a while, all sites looked like this.
- 72deluxe 4y agoI used this when I was running a donated 486 with only 8MB of RAM in about 1998? I was poor. Fond memories.
- realo 4y agoAaahhh... Motif! This reminds me of the time when I replaced Solaris & Motif on my SUN workstation by Linux and KDE. KDE looked much nicer than Motif, to my young eyes. The workstation felt faster after the switch, but maybe I was biased. :)
- hankman86 4y agoIn retrospect, I think that much of the flatter Windows 3.x design is timeless whereas the pseudo 3D bevels of Windows 95 look dated by today’s standards. The only practically useful UX novelties in Windows 95 were the start menu and combining the previously separate file and program manager paradigms.
- usrn 4y agoI've seen some re-interpretations of phaux-3d rectilinear skeuomorphism that used a lot of light scattering effects and looked extremely modern. I thought around this year those would be common but everyone seems to be still hung up on flat design which is a bit disappointing (and then there's adwaita which is off in left field picking daisies as usual.)
- int_19h 4y agoWin3.x had more prominent 3D bevels in places where it did have them - which was all the buttons. I suspect that the main reason why it was generally flatter is because it supported monochrome displays. Win95, on the other hand, required VGA 640x480x16 (colors, not bits) as minimum. And of those 16 EGA colors, there were 4 different shades of grey! - a luxury they made full use of in the new 3D widgets.
- Narishma 4y agoSmall nitpick but those are CGA colors.
- n3storm 4y agoI used calmira back in the nineties :D
- signaru 4y agoIt was Calmira that made me aware of the existence of Delphi. I tried getting my hands on Delphi, but what I only had back then was VB3. Not everything was on the (dial-up) web back then, and I even scanned collections in physical shops where it was hard to find any software not for Win 9x. Eventually I was able to program something in VB that would dock an "X close" button on the corner of active windows (since for me, that was the one glaring detail missing from the Win 9x experience, and the only other option was pay-ware). It was really messy hackish amateur teenager code, but it worked. Fun old times.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoIronically, both were shells for DOS.
- Jaruzel 4y agoTangentially, this makes me wonder if it's worth building a lightweight desktop shell (i.e. app launcher, file explorer, dock, etc.) for the 'Validation OS' version of Windows 11: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/validation-os-overview?view=windows-11 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur... That way, you'd get all the nice security and hardware support of Windows 11, but without all the crap that Microsoft bundle on.
- SixDouble5321 4y agoThis thing was so sick at the time. It really made 3.11 feel better to use. For me at least, Win95 needed a newer computer. It was minute before I could upgrade and this thing at least made me feel a lot better about not having the new hotness.
- ausare 4y agoOh man I remember Calmira from back in the day! Thanks for the blast from the past. IIRC it was written in Delphi which I was using majorly around the same time so had fun poking around its internals and customising it even further. I believe it started out as something called Calypso...those memories are vague though.
- llimos 4y agoThe funniest thing is that they tried to "provide welcome relief from the awkwardness of File Manager"... which Microsoft open-sourced a few years ago for those who still want it with win10/11[1], to much acclaim from its many fans[2] [1] https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16790099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16790099