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Virtual Computer Museum – VNC into Archaic Windows Systems
- cdchn 3y agoI think Windows 2000 is the only one I remember fondly.
- jjbinx007 3y agoI think it's a grossly underrated OS. As good as Windows XP but without the awful garish themes - it had all that made the Windows 98 GIU great but with the stability of Windows NT. Also, I don't think you needed to activate it and it didn't have much in the way of telemetry. We'll never have a Windows version as great again.
- stevekemp 3y agoWindows 2000 was peak-Windows for me, for sure. Not quite as stable as Windows NT4, but pretty close, and it benefited from added support for USB and other "modern" things.
- cdchn 3y agoAnd compatibility with Windows 95 and MS-DOS.
- M95D 3y agoWhat compatibility? What are you talking about? Can't even run Doom. https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/3353-cant-get-dooom-to-play-properly-under-windows-2000/ https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/3353-cant-get-dooom-to...
- anthk 3y agoYou can use, maybe, ReactOS' ntvdm.dll as a replacement. On W95 compatibility, in lots of older games (specially the Direct Draw ones) ran much better than XP.
- Modified3019 3y agoMy only computer for a long time was old thinkpad, so I actually ended up skipping over windows XP entirely. I finally moved on after the first service pack for vista came out (in 2008), which was surprisingly alright in my experience. It ended up being more stable than win2000. The biggest problem with the older windows is that poorly written drivers (which is most of them) had a tendency to bluescreen the entire system when they fucked up. Newer windows is so much more resistant to that now.
- bandergirl 3y ago> [Vista] was surprisingly alright in my experience I never understood the hate for Vista. People were overly complacent and wanted a OS that ran on 128MB of ram like XP did. Vista was not that. When 7 came along, it was pretty much the same core, except now many computers were already Vista-capable. I was using the Vista Beta of my 2GB-RAM computer for 6 months before release and it was vastly better than XP.
- nickweb 3y agoThe hate came from it being pre installed on massively underpowered computers. The majority of users came to vista with a new PC and it just ruined the experience. I still remember trying to troubleshoot a minor issue and it took half a day just because of the performance on this new PC.
- n8cpdx 3y agoProject Mojave was Microsoft’s attempt to correct this issue. It didn’t go well. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ihorvo2tEuA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ihorvo2tEuA
- serf 3y agoI don't remember the specifics, but I do remember that Vista broke a ton of drivers I used for industrial equipment. Serial controllers, that kind of stuff. If I remember right it had something to do with the transition to driver signing beginning around that era. So, it represented a lot of labor. >I was using the Vista Beta of my 2GB-RAM computer for 6 months before release and it was vastly better than XP. you were blessed to have 2gb in 06. a lot of us didn't. [0] [0]: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/CrYAAOSwpOZgQFm7/s-l1600.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/CrYAAOSwpOZgQFm7/s-l1600.jpg
- mepian 3y agoXP had much better compatibility with Windows 95/98 software than 2000, especially games, as far as I remember.
- anthk 3y agoWindows 2000 had a compatibility mode a la XP, but you needed to activate it with a command. No, XP wasn't better, some Direct Draw games just ran under Windows 95, 98, ME or 2000 in compat mode.
- EvanAnderson 3y agoWindows Server 2003 had all the XP goodness but without the UI cruft. I ran it as a daily driver for a few years. Until Windows 7 came out it was the best version of Windows. Product activation was its downside.
- cdchn 3y agoNo telemetry, no activation, efficient non-garish UI, "NT stability" which was great for the time. Yeah, we'll never be able to get that back. I have Windows 11 on my gaming PC and it is... sheeesh.
- irusensei 3y agoI was happy with it before I got pwned by Nimda. I think it was the only time I got infected by a virus (at least knowingly) in my entire life. I did work supporting 2k servers and workstations in my first jobs but I was already a Linuxhead by then.
- another2another 3y agoWindows 7 was also pretty decent, and managed to somewhat redeem the horror that was Vista.
- sixothree 3y agoWindows 7 was a beautiful operating system. It completely redeemed the absolute "horror that was Vista" for a lot of people.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoI enjoyed using Windows 7 a lot. It was stable; much more so than previous versions and actually later versions - an update wasn't likely to break support for any devices or introduce a regression like it sometimes does on 10/11. KDE 5 gives me a similar feeling to what I had with Windows 7. It's very customisable, and indeed with some theming you can make it look almost identical to Windows 7. But what is particularly nice is not so much the aesthetics, but rather the depth of functionality and polish that KDE has. There are hardly any rough edges, and features like KDE Connect are conceptually simple but mind-blowingly efficient in practice.
- ahoka 3y agoJust bought a T43 to run Windows 2000 this week. Just got wifi working with WPA2, so I just need some decent browser and some apps next.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- irdc 3y agoTruth be told I had hoped for something a little more archaic than Windows 95.
- archarios 3y agoWhere's Microsoft BOB!?
- Minocula 3y agocomming soon :D
- mrpippy 3y agoLong ago, Insignia Solutions (famous for the SoftPC/SoftWindows emulators) had a product called NTrigue which I think later turned into Citrix MetaFrame? Not sure about the lineage. Anyway, it was an early NT terminal server product. I remember they ran an open-to-the-Internet NT 3.51 server, you could download the ICA Client and connect to it. Imagine leaving a Windows terminal server that wide-open now.
- sillywalk 3y agoI wonder if you had a say a Windows 98 machine (or a 20+ year old version of Linux, or one of the Unixes) open on the internet now. Are there still bots out there that would find it and exploit it?
- CobrastanJorji 3y agoWhen I hear "Computer Museum," I feel anger, and I realize that I'm not yet over Paul Allen's family dismantling his Living Computer Museum after his death. That place was doing really great work.
- nxobject 3y agoInteresting choice of tech stack – we're RDPing into a Win 8+ Windows session that, in turn, seems to be either using RDP or VNC to connect to virtual sessions. I imagine that, if we were creating something like this today, we'd just emulate in the browser with a streaming disk!
- duskwuff 3y ago> I imagine that, if we were creating something like this today, we'd just emulate in the browser with a streaming disk! Kind of like what https://infinitemac.org/ https://infinitemac.org/ does for Apple systems?
- hnthrowaway0328 3y agoSeems to be down for me. Anyone else?
- treesknees 3y agoIt's great that someone is trying to preserve these operating systems. However the choice of limiting it to 1 user per OS at a time makes the museum/website unusable. I tried several times over the span of 20 minutes and couldn't get into a single VM. While it doesn't cover everything, there is no shortage of browser-based emulators that can run most of the software listed. Windows 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1 https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/ https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/ Windows 95: https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox Windows 98 http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98 http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98 Windows 2000 https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&graphic=1&w=1024&h=768 https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr... Windows NT 4.0 https://pixelsuft.github.io/onwin/emulator.html?hda=winnt&cdb=none&seavgabios=true&winnt=yes&autostart=yes https://pixelsuft.github.io/onwin/emulator.html?hda=winnt&cd... Some of the more esoteric OSes, or the ones which actually need a little bit of horse power to run like Vista, you can easily download from archive.org and run locally.
- elijahrdev 3y agoWe actually run a site pretty similar to this in concept, we've got 9 VMs total and you can take 20 second turns controlling them with other users. There's chat, and if someone breaks it, you can start a vote to reset. https://computernewb.com/collab-vm/ https://computernewb.com/collab-vm/
- Minocula 3y agoI first became aware of Hacker News thanks to this project. Great project. There is certainly room for improvement, but it works and is fun!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Minocula 3y agoOp here...Thank you for all the visits and feedback. Thanks to them I was able to optimize and test the system. I will be documenting more details about the setup and operation in the future if anyone wants to build something like this or is simply interested. At the moment, like every free project, there is a lack of money to make the system faster and more stable. Since 2024-01-11T12:31 in my time zone over 2183 connections have been registered and I am happy that Hacker News is now reporting about it. here I post some nice trial and error tests from users. https://firncloud.trialanderror.tech/s/Kwa9WGjc7oLETYm https://firncloud.trialanderror.tech/s/Kwa9WGjc7oLETYm