4 ms·
As a side topic, I wish we still had something like Windows 3.1/95/98, that has a touch of personal usage (focuses on multimedia/gaming instead of business/serv
by markus_zhang 9mo ago
As a side topic, I wish we still had something like Windows 3.1/95/98, that has a touch of personal usage (focuses on multimedia/gaming instead of business/server).
Do you still remember Microsoft Home? My first Windows gaming experience, other than Minesweeper and Solitaire ofc, was the Fury3 demo, which contains only one level from the licensed game, on a Windows 95 Home Entertainment CD. There were also Encarta and other Home products that never took off. The only problem is frequent BSOD, which was solved by the NT kernel, so I guess XP was the pinnacle of personal computing OS, although it does fail some DOS and earlier Windows games.
Do we still have a compatible OS nowadays? Linux is mostly for server and business, and while it has gained some popularity as a desktop OS, it definitely still have a long way to reach the intimacy that early Windows offered, and I doubt it will ever regress back to a "Home computer OS". But maybe we can build on top of that. I mean we can build software on top of Linux that provides the friendly vibe.
- theYipster 9mo agoI love the care and polish that went into the Microsoft Windows XP Welcome/Tour app that played after install. That was the peak of the summit—quality wise.
- markus_zhang 9mo agoYeah, there was a lot of good memories. And it does have a 64-bit version so not a too-bad option as a retro-OS. But I think we need to find retro hardware for it to work properly.
- theYipster 9mo agoActually I just installed it over the weekend in a QEMU/KVM VM on my modern desktop. Took about 20 minutes, and works very nicely. You can give it up to 4GB of RAM. Now, I can't use it for much (aside from playing the welcome tour,) because the last thing I want to do is expose it to the internet... On the other hand, I hear there is a modern browser that is maintained for it.
- Cthulhu_ 9mo agoThing is, at the time it felt like these experiences (e.g. demos) were rare and a treat; nowadays you can open up Steam or the App Store and get full versions of full games with hundreds if not thousands of hours of gameplay right there and then. Back in the Windows era, you relied on friends that copied shareware (or sometimes full versions!) games onto diskettes, or that one guy with a CD burner. For a short amount of time these people made a lot of money on the side, selling software or music albums for €25 apiece.
- hedora 9mo agoOur recent computers all came with a copy of Win11 that never made it past the setup flow. However, they regularly run win 3.11 under “dosbox staging”, which is a greatly improved, but poorly named fork of dosbox.