Internet Archive Brings Classic Windows 3.1 Apps To Your Browser (google.com)

The Internet Archive has made it possible for you to make a virtual visit to the wide, wide world of Windows 3.1 games (and other apps, too), via a collection of virtualized images. Jason Scott is the game collector and digital archivist behind the online museum of malware mentioned here a few days ago. "Now," Ars Technica reports, "Scott and his crew have done it again with the Windows 3.X Showcase, made up of a whopping 1,523 downloads (and counting), all running in a surprisingly robust, browser-based JavaScript emulation of Windows 3.1. You'll recognize offerings like WinRisk and SkiFree, but the vast majority of the collection sticks to a particularly wild world of Windows shareware history, one in which burgeoning developers seemed to throw everything imaginable against 3.1's GUI wall to see what stuck." Says the article: A volunteer "really did the hard work" of getting the Windows files required for each DOSBOX instance down to 1.8 MB, and in the process came up with a more centralized version of those files on his server's side, as opposed to kinds that would require optimizations for every single emulated app.

Comments

Apps

[Calydor]

Strange.

I don't recall those programs being called apps. Applications maybe, more commonly programs ... but not apps.

Re:Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Apps

[TheReaperD]

Remember though, this was in the wild west days of PCs where there didn't seem to be a standard for anything. Sometime I miss those days, then I remember the "fun" of dial-up and move on.

Re:Apps

[nine-times]

Maybe you have a bad memory...?

I've been working in the IT industry since the early 90s, and the term "app" has been used as a shorthand for "application" since then at least. It has fairly recently taken the connotation of a mobile app, or some other kind of mini-application (web apps?), but that's actually something from the last 10 years. I forget exactly when that started because I have a bad memory too.

Re:Apps

[110010001000]

Didn't we call them "programs"?

Re:Apps

[gtall]

The technical term was "proggie".

Re:Apps

[jones_supa]

I don't recall those programs being called apps. Applications maybe, more commonly programs ... but not apps.

"Apps" is shorthand for "applications". Has always been.

Re:Apps

[nine-times]

Yes, that too. My understanding (though this was before my time) was that "application" used to refer to the use, whereas "program" was the thing you ran. So "word processing" is an application of your computer, while "Microsoft Word" is the program you use to do that. That was according to my dad, who worked for IBM back in the days of punch cards, but it's possible that was just his own distinction.

But by the 90s, you could describe Microsoft Word as either an "application" or "program" (or "app"). They were all fairly interchangeable. Admittedly, though, it could have been a regional thing, since we didn't really have the Internet yet (yes, it existed, but it wasn't in heavy practical use for most people).

Re:Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't run programs, I ran "warez," you insensitive clod! :)

Re:Apps

[CodeArtisan]

I don't recall those programs being called apps. Applications maybe, more commonly programs ... but not apps.

"Apps" is shorthand for "applications". Has always been.

I used WIn 3.1 when it was first released. We never called them "apps" then.

Re:Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

The slang form of "application" is "app".

The slang form of "mini application" is "applet". (Similar to a baby pig being called a piglet.)

These mobile phone programs should be called "applets", but they never will because JAVA RUINED IT FOR EVERYONE.

Dammit, Java...

Re:Apps

[Solandri]

Both terms were used. Application referred more to something which was polished and sellable to the end user (c.f. 'appliance'). Those could be called programs as well. But lines of code which you hacked together for your high school intro to computers course were always called a program, never an application. App was the shortened version (prog sounded like something you'd do in bed to your SO).

The parlance may have started with the Apple III and Macintosh. I think Apple referred to its GUI apps only as application, never as programs. But they didn't own the term. They did file for a trademark for the term 'applet' (see how it has "apple" in it?), which refers to a really small or simple application.

Re:Apps

[Scoth]

As a kid in the 80s and 90s, "Applications" were the things Dad used to get work done, "Utilities" were boring things that you weren't supposed to touch because you could break the computer, and "Games" were the only fun things. They were all programs, though you sounded like an egghead calling them that.

Re:Apps

[jones_supa]

It doesn't matter. We can call them "apps" now. It's just a shorthand.

Re:Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all programs are application programs.

Re:Apps

[rgbscan]

Back in the 90's, I always though of 'apps' as 'applets' - little utilities that lived in my Apple Menu. Calculator and AfterDark and whatnot...

Re: Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

I used Win 3.0 when it was released. And laughed because it was even less functional than GEM. In Mac-land, we oven referred to programs as apps back then. MacOS X even calls them app bundles.

Re:Apps

[unixisc]

Yeah, that was how I understood it as well. Apps would be things that came pre-installed WITH Windows, like Calculator or Paint(brush?) or Notepad. Things like Microsoft Office or Lotus Notes or Autocad were full blown applications or programs, but certainly not called apps.

Besides, w/ Windows 8 and the store, app has come to mean anything you download from the store. But if you have your old CD of Civilization III and install it using the same technique that's been used since Windows 95, that is very different from downloading an 'app'.

Re:Apps

[unixisc]

But they have very different implications. Today, an 'app' is something I download from the Windows store. Whereas if I either get a DVD or an USB drive, or download something from its website and then install it, it's something very different in terms of the setting.

Re:Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

And "killer app" was a concept long before smartphones.

Re: Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

> In Mac-land, we oven referred to programs as apps back then.

Indeed, Apple even called their first object-oriented framework MacApp. The term was not unfamiliar to developers before that.

Here, at WWDC 1998 Steve Jobs says, "people want an advanced OS that runs Mac apps."

Re:Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it really isn't. It's the same thing, you just got used to hearing it in a new context.

Re:Apps

[unixisc]

No, it's not a mere context. An app is something - you go to the Windows store online, you see something that catches your eye (usually free), you try it out, if you like it, you keep it.

An application/program is something which today - you go to a specific web site, download it from there, then hit install and it runs. Usually, it will set up something in your program files, and would have its own folder, uninstall routine and so on.

Re:Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

It's exactly the same thing.

"App" = "application program," no matter how you obtain it, install it, what language it's written in, or what platform you run it on.

Re:Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure if you are agreeing with the parent or not, but the term app was never used during that time.

Re:Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here. We called them programs most of the time, occasionally applications, but I can't say I remember them being called apps until the last few years. Maybe it depended on who you hung out with and where?

In fact I had assumed that the word "app" was coined by a marketing type trying to give stodgy old programs a shiny new make-over when the mac/windows world finally started to catch up with "official" linux repositories and apt-get (not app get you'll notice). Guess it's also a way to distinguish between reasonably well vetted programs and the malware-roulette you had to play downloading programs from many websites.

Re:Apps

[KGIII]

I've called programs "apps" for a rather long time. It was "programs" and then "applications" and then just "apps." I don't know where or when the conversion started for any of those but that happened long before smart phones or apps in the way you're describing them - even programs with full installers and the likes, they've been apps for a very long time - since the earliest days, as far as I recollect.

I want to say that "apps" was in use in the 80s and I know we used it in the 90s - especially while typing. "Make sure you install these three apps..." I don't think it was common vernacular but it wasn't unheard of. Frequently, it was slang for applications which was slang for programs and I don't know of any more specific divide than that - at that time.

Arguably, the definition is different today. We should probably limit the use to just those "appy" things, like things from the Windows Store (I've never actually used that), phone apps, tablet apps, etc... Probably the Google Chrome apps is a good example of something that is also a valid choice to call an app. Words change and my clinging to the old meaning will not help me communicate clearly. Today, for better or worse, the word has a bit more refinement to it and is a subset of programs. So, I guess that's probably for the best - so long as it doesn't lead to additional confusion.

Re:Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you call things that you install with apt-get?

Re:Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Apts?

Re:Apps

[HoppQ]

If it was long and complex and hard to understand, it was just "prog". :-P

Can someone explain how it does it?

[Viol8]

Is the javascript emulating the OS and all applications itself or is the javascript emulating an old PC and then the windows binaries are running on that? I'm guessing the latter since doing the former would be a boatload of work. Impressive whichever way they did it.

Re:Can someone explain how it does it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Javascript run version of dosbox emulating computer to run windows/apps.

Re:Can someone explain how it does it?

[eXoScoriae]

If you google Win3xO, you'll find the collection he took and based this on. I know because I created the collection. I suppose I'm the "volunteer" he mentioned. I built Win3xO by taking individual Windows 3.x installs (running in Dosbox), gutting them of extra crap, and that gets them down to about 25mb, compressed.Then I had to launch into windows and install any versions of Win32, WinG, Quicktime, etc that the game required. I created a handful of "templates" that had the most common configurations to save time. Each game has the original media (cd image, floppy image, or file dump if it was shareware), mounts it, and then launches Win3x. I used a few tricks to automate the launching of the game once Win3x started. Sometimes this was as basic as just putting a shortcut in the startup folder, but that was a final solution when nothing else worked. In general, I wanted win3x to exit when the game/app closed. If you download my version it is about 350gb, but it is all local. It also includes a front end with box scans, screen shots, game descriptions, manuals, etc.... Its compatible with my previous release eXoDOS, which is the same project, but for DOS games. Interestingly, Jason took that one and put it online last year. But because of the method Jason uses, he breaks a majority of the games when he attempts to make them sompatible with his java script dosbox. This is because he didn't take time to actually talk to me first, and he didn't understand how my conf files worked. So he attempted to automate the conf files. The causes speed issues in some cases, and in other cases it simply doesn't call the right executable. Which is my my DOS collection has 5,500 games, but once it got online, it was down to 2,000. I appreciate Jason's work adapting my collections and getting them to more people... but I wish he wasn't such a clown about giving credit to people who actually did the bulk of the work. Not only would it be nice, but it would lead to a better quality output. Something where more than 40% of the games actually worked.

Re:Can someone explain how it does it?

[omnichad]

I used a few tricks to automate the launching of the game once Win3x started. Sometimes this was as basic as just putting a shortcut in the startup folder, but that was a final solution when nothing else worked. In general, I wanted win3x to exit when the game/app closed.

I have a great way of doing this. I have several games on my MythTV HTPC that I want to open/close by remote control. And I had to find a way to automate startup of the game and exit of Windows.

You can add an exe as an argument to win in autoexec.bat and it will run that on startup. I used a recently-created free program called runexit.exe to launch the game. When the game is exited, runexit.exe shuts down Windows.

So for a game called game.exe, it was:
win C:\runexit.exe C:\gamepath\game.exe

This worked great, while trying to run the game as the Windows shell instead of progman.exe just plain didn't work.

Re:Can someone explain how it does it?

[omnichad]

I guess that's your method, too - it's one of the files in the vanilla 3.1 demo.

Re:Can someone explain how it does it?

[Toshito]

Good god you have a lot of spare time! It must have taken years to assemble this collection.

I'm happy that someone worked to preserve these works of art.

Is your collection available online?

Re:Can someone explain how it does it?

[operagost]

I also seem to recall that in win.ini, there was a variable called shell. Normally it pointed to progman.exe, or a third-party shell if you had one. Maybe you could put the name of the application in there to start it, then exit Windows when it quits.

Re:Can someone explain how it does it?

[operagost]

Sorry, I skipped the last line of your post. My bad.

Re: Can someone explain how it does it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shell=game.exe

Re:Can someone explain how it does it?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the patients of a saint. Think of having to sit thru enough of 'barbie and her magical house' to make it work... AND to add injury to insult paying for the privilege.

Re:Can someone explain how it does it?

[Reziac]

Thank you for doing this. Maybe they aren't so useful today but I would really hate for this material to be lost.

And there are a few old DOS and Win3.x programs that still don't seem to have good replacements.

Re:Can someone explain how it does it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Civwin. Or Winciv. It run on Win 3.1 (surprise!) and I was still running it in XP when disaster stroke and the laptop got stolen. THEN... I tried to locate the file and it was no longer available! I ve found other versions but not THE Civwin (or Winciv) original executable. What happened? Other Civilization games are not the same, no matter what people would say, and I long to play that same game again. I am also interested in the Session MIDI sequencer and score writer for Win 3.1. It was version between 1 and 3. It is characterized by a very useful feature, lost in version 4, the last version I could find before it went out of scope in internet and away in the same stolen laptop: you could place any note on the score then accommodate it into the right pitch by using the flat/sharp modifier tool ! From any octave to any other octave through all intermediate tones; the last version was strict and flat/sharp would only flatten/raise the note and stop. Can these people locate those two important apps? I find NO SUBSTITUTES along the internet throughout all these years in any version of Windows but I am sure both can run in all Windows versions. AND I DID PAY FOR BOTH PROGRAMS IN ITS MOMENT. Maybe the soundcard is still among the best ever though its brand name did not make it into the big leagues, unfortunately. (Ami Pro 2.0 would also be a must, but it may still be available). If these apps cannot be found, your project does suffer of a very big Uselessness issue....

Stock installation? Not really.

[Anonymous Coward]

I note that the so-called stock installation contains QuickTime, the euro symbol and the Create Audio tools, none of which shipped with my WfW3.11.

Re:Stock installation? Not really.

[TheReaperD]

QuickTime... thanks. I had managed to forget about that and RealPlayer until you brought it up!

Re:Stock installation? Not really.

[Anonymous Coward]

QuickTime on a webpage? Hang on, just let me completely hang your fucking browser. There you go. It's really fucked now. You'll have to kill the process.

Re:Stock installation? Not really.

[operagost]

I'm still hoping to see that Phantom Menace trailer someday, but RealPlayer is still buffering.

Link to the real thing

[Ivan Stepaniuk]

Just pick your application to run here:

https://archive.org/details/so...

Use the preview, dimothy

[Hognoxious]

WTF is a "showcaseâ"? Is it Norwegian or something?

Re:Use the preview, dimothy

[squiggleslash]

It's Scandawegian for "Website that doesn't support Unicode and incorrectly validates forms containing unicode", I believe.

Wheel of Fortune!

[Anonymous Coward]

I had that Wheel of Fortune!

But everybody knows that the best Win 3.1 shareware games were:

Operation Inner Space, a top down spaceship arcade shooter where you went inside the filesystem of your PC and collected the icons before they could be destroyed by viruses. Complete with a super secret ending! Inexplicably, it's still being sold TO THIS DAY by SDI software.

World Empire IV. A simplified Risk-like boardgame where you can attack neighboring countries, and the results are decided by a coin-flip fifty fifty between whether one of yours or theirs units would die, so it's entirely possible for 3 to beat 6 in a fight.

Re:Wheel of Fortune!

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 3.1 is for wslam.exe, and nothing else.

Re:Wheel of Fortune!

[Higaran]

Skifree, that's all you need, I spent many hours on that game eaten by the snowman a million times.

Re:Wheel of Fortune!

[Anonymous Coward]

You made SkiFree a dirty thing.

Windows 3.x games? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

In those days the best games were DOS games. Windows simply used up too much memory, and you still had to faff with your config.sys and autoexec.bat to make those even start in some cases, until that thing in DOS 6 appeared that tried to do it for you and failed in some cases, was still better to do it by hand.

Re:Windows 3.x games? No.

[TheReaperD]

Ah yes, the days of himem.sys and emm386... Most of the time it wasn't so bad but, every now and then you'd have two applications that required mutually exclusive settings. Now that was a pain. DOS was not exactly set up for multi-boot configurations.

Re:Windows 3.x games? No.

[DarkOx]

Actually it was, at least for DOS 6.0 on you could easily have multiple configurations specified in config.sys and autoexec, which could be setup to provide a menu based selection of which configuration you wanted to boot on start up.

Re:Windows 3.x games? No.

[The-Ixian]

Yeah and ISA Plug-n-Pray cards from competing vendors that *would not* work together in the same system... jumper pins, dip switches and manual IRQ settings... oh those were the days...

Re:Windows 3.x games? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. And that situation continued well into the Win9x era. In those days most games were platformers, probably because doing other things was pretty tough on the hardware of the day, and even most of those wouldn't run under Windows, most commonly because they either wanted to use a video mode that was incompatible with Windows or because the combination of game + Windows used too much memory, causing swapping which would make the game run like molasses.

Re:Windows 3.x games? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, those WERE the days. And it all worked on a 80286 processor at 12Mhz, with 1MB of RAM, and was all stored on a 40 MB MFM Hard drive paired with an Adaptec card.

Re:Windows 3.x games? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Adlib vs Soundblaster...fight!

Re:Windows 3.x games? No.

[TheReaperD]

Yea, they finally implemented multiple profiles by then because it had been such an issue. DOS 3.x and 4.x, forget it. I can't remember if profile support came in DOS 5.x or 6.x.

Re:Windows 3.x games? No.

[TheReaperD]

Yea, I remember having to hunt down 3Com modems that had hardware ISA jumpers because of Plug-n-pray issues. I had enough problems that I finally just started buying those cards full time. They had a plug-n-play option but, you could set the IRQ via hardware. Best of both worlds of the era.

Re:Windows 3.x games? No.

[TheReaperD]

MFM... really glad those days are gone, PATA too.

As I recall, Win 3.1 deserves its own wing

[mark_reh]

in the online museum of malware.

Re:As I recall, Win 3.1 deserves its own wing

[thegarbz]

Was there very much malware directed at Win 3.1, or was most of it just working on the underlying DOS system?

Re:As I recall, Win 3.1 deserves its own wing

[Mryll]

There was plenty. People in HR always seemed to pick things up from bad resumes. I remember chasing KAK virus through a ton of startup options manually as an exercise and gave up on it for lack of time. A lot of the malware was more benign or experimental in those days, things like displaying a message rather than wrecking things or trying to steal information. There was more of a distinction between viruses and invited software that did things you didn't like, gator etc.

Re:As I recall, Win 3.1 deserves its own wing

[mark_reh]

I was referring specifically to windows 3.1, not malware directed at it.

Recognize what now?

[sjbe]

You'll recognize offerings like WinRisk and SkiFree,

Umm, we will? I substantially predate Windows 3.1 and I never heard of those applications. Maybe they were a big thing in some circles but certainly nothing most of us would recognize.

Re:Recognize what now?

[TheReaperD]

Yea, I can't say I have a lot of Windows 3.x experience either. I preferred working with DOS and only used Windows when I had to until Windows 95 rolled around and it started to resemble something useable.

Re:Recognize what now?

[Anonymous Coward]

SkiFree was a bona fide classic. It even has an XKCD comic!

https://www.google.co.uk/#q=skifree&es_sm=93

Re:Recognize what now?

[OzPeter]

SkiFree was a bona fide classic. It even has an XKCD comic!

https://www.google.co.uk/#q=skifree&es_sm=93

FFS .. what is /. coming to? Mentioning that a topic has an XKCD related cartoon yet not even linking to the original source

Even the ACs here are getting lamer.

But yeah, I'm with the OP on this one. I predate Windows in total for working with computers and I have no idea about skiFree. Maybe its a split between those of use who see computers as a tool for work vs those that see them as entertainment.

Re:Recognize what now?

[Dr. Evil]

" Maybe its a split between those of use who see computers as a tool for work vs those that see them as entertainment."

I was 16 in 1992. If you were under 8 or over 18, or didn't have brothers or sisters that age at this time, you probably missed this stuff.

Now you want scary... Skifree came out only 5 years before the debut of Slashdot.... And Slashdot is getting close to 20 years old.

https://xkcd.com/1393/

Re:Recognize what now?

[Anonymous Coward]

You all should thank Exo for making this happen. He spent the past 3 years and a good sum of his own money buying every crappy win3.1 game/application he could get his hands on. He is the same one that made that MSDOS collection happen as well on archive. He is working with the archive guys to make it work in the browser so everyone can see.

Make no mistakes here. Some of this stuff is truly terrible. He and I disagree on that point though. I do concede that there probably is some OK stuff in there. But win3.x had a huge mountain of bad stuff in there. There are some gems but they are far and few between. It was not until win95 that people actually made some decent applications for the Win16/32 API.

Also the discussions people had on how to do this. Kinda funny. I personally did not like the way the collection ended up. As it ended up about 50gig bigger than it should be. But the method he came up with was simple and fairly easy to reproduce. That was key for him even being able to finish it at all. If you think a current Win10 application is a nightmare to move around between boxes. Try a win3.1 program where people would regularly install their own copy of system dlls over existing ones then break the whole shell for everyone else but their program.

Re:Recognize what now?

[omnichad]

Myst and YDKJ both work on 3.1

Though Windows 95 was already out when You Don't Know Jack was released.

Re:Recognize what now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exo's a history-revising warez lamer. He didn't even get WSLAM.EXE

Actual Link

[110010001000]

The actual link to the archive is: https://archive.org/details/so...

Win3.x Win8.x

[Anonymous Coward]

Those were the days, when Windows did not spy its users and it used navigation components which had some visual clue for their usage. Nowadays the programs must be flat fullscreen bi-color planes which have only huge text and user is left randomly clicking every word to find out which are actually buttons. Current Windows actually emulates the early point-and-click games, where user needed to discover functionality by brute force trial and error.

Re: Win3.x Win8.x

[Anonymous Coward]

Blame web and mobile app designers and use a Mac while you can, we are going to flat land of GUI design and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Re: Win3.x Win8.x

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there is. Move to a non-systemd Linux.

Re: Win3.x Win8.x

[cb88]

May as well drop glibc and udev while you are at it... and adobe flash.

That leaves you with alpine and void linux (they may still have udev but are moving away from it)

Re: Win3.x Win8.x

[jones_supa]

Blame web and mobile app designers and use a Mac while you can, we are going to flat land of GUI design and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

OS X introduced flat GUI in Yosemite as well...

Windows 7 and Ubuntu Unity are the remaining ones that still look cool.

I've Been Using DOSBox For Years

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using DOSBox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOSBox) since RedHat 5.2 to run a DOS program that I can't find a more useful replacement. I wrote it for a 64k machine with two 92k single sided floppies. Works great in DOSBox.

Now do XP !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather run this than Windows 10 ! Hopefully something like this (or even better a fully functioning ReactOS) will one day allow us to run our old Windows applications without using Microsofts spyware operating system.

Re:Now do XP !!!

[omnichad]

XP won't run in DOSBox. Windows ME was the last system to have a DOS (vs. NT) subsystem.

But this DOES use actual Windows 3.1, just not MS-DOS. That's replaced with DOSBox.

Re:Win3.x Win8.x

[squiggleslash]

I'm finding it fairly amusing that Windows 3.x actually looks quite fresh and, ugly pre-anti-aliasing font aside, fairly modern. Which is odd because at the time, as a user of AmigaOS 2.04 at home, I thought it looked clumsy and ugly (and everyone else started to agree about the look of Windows 3.x when Windows 95 came out.)

There's a lot of flatness to the Windows 3.x UI, which is something that's in vogue again.

Ah, been done before...

[Chris Mattern]

http://windowsreallygoodeditio...

Re:Ah, been done before...

[Anonymous Coward]

That one requires Flash unfortunately so it doesn't work for me. The Internet Archive's implementation runs without plugins.

On the topic of old software being emulated

[Solandri]

This site has a bunch of arcade and video games from the 1980s emulated in flash. Those of you who grew up with a NES may be interested in their NES games library.

The site is a good argument for why (1) copyright on software should be for a shorter duration than for other media, or (2) copyright on software should expire if it hasn't been republished for a decade or two. Unlike an old book which you can pick off the shelf in a library and read, software is pretty useless unless you can actually run it. Unless the copyright owner is actively porting the old software to run on new hardware, it's essentially become abandonware. And only through the work of sites like this (technically illegal under copyright law) can people experience what the software was originally like.

Re:On the topic of old software being emulated

[omnichad]

Copyright doesn't have to expire for this to be possible. Companies can choose to officially offer free licenses to abandonware, while still selling emulated/ported versions commercially - and preventing other companies from profiting commercially on their IP. But instead, they want to re-monetize for every generation. Just look at Virtual Console on Wii and Wii U. Re-buy if you want it on 3DS too.

I just wish I could buy a used legal copy of The Neverhood for less than $30. I never played it when it was new (I was in high school and broke). The creator of the game even wants to release it, but EA isn't even willing to put in the effort to release it for the 6,000 people that posted on Gog.com that they want it too. Just think - I would pay $10-15 easily and so would most of the 6,000. How much could it possibly cost to put a release together?

Game companies are just shortsighted for not looking at long tail sales. Yes, The Neverhood would only sell maybe 10,000 more copies in 5 years. But they own the rights to dozens or hundreds of abandoned games. All they have to do is dedicate one staff person part-time with a little authority.

Ah, the good old WYSIWYG days

[Tablizer]

It might be a more stable platform than the current web stack where different browser brands under different OS settings render things in different places and different ways. Back in the day they were positioned mostly by absolute coordinates, reducing positioning surprises. Auto-flow has mostly failed.

Re:Ah, the good old WYSIWYG days

[omnichad]

Auto-flow has mostly failed.

??? I think you're behind the times.

The problem is people were using a WYSIWYG mindset to try to design them. The responsive layout paradigm actually does fairly well. For an overly commercial example, just look at starbucks.com on a desktop browser and resize the window.

The world can't move on with everyone on the same screen size. Phones are here to stay as are tablets. Even Microsoft tried to advocate for resolution independence and using "Twips" as the primary unit for their VB GUI design tools. And now that their OS actually supports changing the DPI setting, you can see just how few people were forward thinking in their designs (and yes, Microsoft failed a lot at this too).

Re:Ah, the good old WYSIWYG days

[Tablizer]

For every one that works well, there's probably 10 that are screwy.

The world can't move on with everyone on the same screen size.

A fixed size is not what I asked for. I said, let the server compute the resizing, NOT the client. Big difference.

Re:Ah, the good old WYSIWYG days

[omnichad]

For every one that works well, there's probably 10 that are screwy.

This is teh world as normal.

let the server compute the resizing, NOT the client.

What? Explain. So every time I want to change my browser window size, the server is going to send me a new page? Or do you mean separate mobile vs desktop sites, which breaks permalinks and search results?

Re:Ah, the good old WYSIWYG days

[Tablizer]

How often do you resize your window?

Further, I'm thinking of a standard for production/work applications, not eye-candy brochures and read-only sites.

Re:Ah, the good old WYSIWYG days

[omnichad]

On a phone, a lot - I'll turn my phone to the best orientation for a specific page.

It's not as easy to come up with production/work applications off the top of my head, because I don't generally do those in the browser. The first that comes to mind is my own grocery list and meal schedule site, which I wrote myself and is not public.

But you didn't explain why the server side is better capable of handling varied screen sizes from small phone to large phone to tablet to desktop site. If the content is different for every screen size, the work needed to do that is still going to be dynamic, not 2 or 3 static designs - there are a lot of screens and embedded browsers out there. And then a large scale app loses all chance of caching for a lot of it.

Re:Ah, the good old WYSIWYG days

[Tablizer]

The server could pre-calculate both horizontal and vertical phone orientations so each is ready when you flip it.

It's not as easy to come up with production/work applications off the top of my head, because I don't generally do those in the browser.

They are gradually moving to browser, but it's difficult because browser GUI's are a PITA.

But you didn't explain why the server side is better capable of handling varied screen sizes from small phone to large phone to tablet to desktop site.

I thought I did. The client would be far simpler because it doesn't need auto-flow logic: it's just a dumb coordinate plotter. And one gets consistent results regardless of client. All 800x300 clients will look identical regardless of "browser" make or version, for example. The designer can do WYSIWYG testing and doesn't have to worry about client auto-flow differences. Auto-flow is one of the greatest evils of web browsers in my opinion from a developer and tester effort standpoint.

Re:Ah, the good old WYSIWYG days

[omnichad]

And my desktop browser windows is set at 1263x941. So you're saying the designer is going to create a static composition for every permutation?

As a web programmer myself, I understand the challenges and still think that the server would essentially have to be essentially doing the auto-flow from its end to be practical, and then you're just introducing latency for no reason and increasing load page size (because of sending the mobile browser two versions). There are more possible screen sizes than you can possibly keep up with. You'd have to account for vertical and landscape resolutions for every possible phone, my Wii U gamepad, any desktop browser size....

Yes, web design gets progressively harder year by year, but WYSIWYG editing is the biggest cause of trouble. This is why I typically handcode HTML, because you really have to build it structurally, rather than visually for it to adapt properly.

Re:Ah, the good old WYSIWYG days

[Tablizer]

So you're saying the designer is going to create a static composition for every permutation?

I didn't say that. I don't know where you got that. Let me try again: The resizing is computed ON THE SERVER, NOT THE CLIENT. But, it still happens.

The phone example was just an optimization suggestion. And again, I'm mostly thinking about work-oriented applications for desktops. Users don't normally resize their screen very often.

Note you could also have a zoom-mode in your browser that could scale up and down linearly, similar to Control plus and minus in web browsers, but it would be more exact proportion-wise.

Yes, web design gets progressively harder year by year, but WYSIWYG editing is the biggest cause of trouble. This is why I typically handcode HTML, because you really have to build it structurally, rather than visually for it to adapt properly.

If you target a screen-size of what's typically about 1000x by 700y by current conventions, you cover what's usually needed for work. The exception may be a scrollable grid, I see no problem with allowing the grid window/panel to stretch. But most panels can work just fine with WYSIWYG layouts. Tool panels and data-entry forms can be designed WYSIWYG.

Client-side auto-adapting is "nice", but not worth the added cost. I used to spend about 70% on business logic and 30% and UI. With the web stack it's now more like 80% on UI and 20% on biz logic. That's messed up.

Economies could save possibly trillions if they bring back WYSIWYG. It made developing of work-oriented software cheaper, quicker, and simpler. Chasing auto-flex, especially on the client-side, has been labor sink. It has its place, but that place is NOT everywhere.

Re:Ah, the good old WYSIWYG days

[omnichad]

When it does it on the server, it's still auto-adapting and it's still not WYSIWYG. I don't see any practical difference between work done on the client and work done on the server. It's not resource-intensive, by any means.

Re:Ah, the good old WYSIWYG days

[Tablizer]

For one, you don't get different clients doing auto-flow different ways. The server would do it ONE WAY for all client brands and versions (unless explicitly coded for differences).

Clients doing auto-flow different has been a huge practical problem in my experience. Sure, with enough experience and practice one might finally over-come that, but why make it Rocket Science when it could be dirt simple: move it to where you want? I'm a multi-hatter in my position, I don't have the time to master auto-flow nuances, and why should an org pay for that when it COULD BE simple. Why pay 3x for something that gives a 10% benefit (at best). It's not logical.

In-house staff had no problem with coordinate-based tools like Oracle Forms and VB classic. The auto-flow crap has confused a good many.

Second, you don't have to use auto-flow at all, or only use it for parts of a project instead of the entire thing (like the grid example I gave). The current standards don't give you a practical coordinate-only option, in part because font rendering is too unpredictable.

Orly

[DeBaas]

Good news for the people at Orly airport .

Why is the splash screen cyan?

[Just Some Guy]

It seems like emulated old versions of Windows end up with cyan where they're supposed to be white, and it's been this way for ages. I used to run Win 3.1 under PC-Task on my Amiga to handle one specific business app, and the splash screens even back then were cyan instead of white. That's still true in my browser just now when I launched a couple of the article's emulators. Why would that be? Is there some bug in ancient VGA hardware that Windows exploited to render white instead of greenish-blue?

Re:Why is the splash screen cyan?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't remember it ever being white, so it probably was a bug on your side or some customization if it came pre-installed. The NT 3.1 splash screen was gray, by the way.

Re:Why is the splash screen cyan?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was supposed to be cyan, that's the background colour of the image as it shipped on the original disks. (However, it was possible to change the splash screen to something else, provided that after RLE compression the image fit within 64 kB minus the size of the Windows loader.)

"killer app" != "app"

[luis_a_espinal]

Didn't we call them "programs"?

And "killer app" was a concept long before smartphones.

Everyone in this industry will have differing experience. This is mine: "killer app" is something that came during the dot-com when everyone and their grandma wanted a spot in the .com valuation orgy.

But as far as I remember, the "app" in "killer app" never carried over to the general lingo. It was rarely "application", but "program". Sure, we used "applications" in formal docs and lingo, but in the typical work vernacular, either among ourselves or when interacting with users, it was typically "programs" (specially if these were in-house built ones.)

I squint my eyes trying to remember when we the word "apps" started replacing "programs". And I remember my years when companies started ditching their token ring networks in favor of Ethernet, offices weren't relying on Compuserve anymore to go to the internet and businesses started developing their own "intranets" (btw, it was a good move to pepper your CV with "intranet", headhunters used to like that shit, like catnip or something.)

And if my memory serves me well, we used to refer to those as "systems" initially as a connotation that these weren't "programs" that you install on a desktop, but multi-tiered systems.

YMMV obviously, but I think I didn't start seeing "application" as a general word till 2005-2006 when finally the whole industry was going full swing, scaling up from the ASP model of things into the SaaS model we see today.

That's my experience, and experience is always local (I'm in South Florida, a tech wasteland). Other, more technically diverse markets might have seen a different pattern in their professional lingo.

Clarification [Re:Ah, the good old WYSIWYG days]

[Tablizer]

The server would do it ONE WAY for all client brands and versions (unless explicitly coded for differences).

Let me re-state this to make sure I'm clear. By "one way" I don't mean the same layout for all client devices, but rather that the layout would be consistent across all client devices for a given target size.

For example, if we use centimeters as our standard (as an example only), then if an Apple client had a 8cm by 20cm screen and if an Android client had an 8cm by 20cm screen, then the positions and proportions of the GUI objects would be identical. This is different than the current situation where the same screen size on a given device or browser may have variations not found on another browser or device with the same screen size. Buttons or text may wrap differently, for example.

Server-side scaling and layout management would eliminate this problem, and simplify the client software because the client software no longer needs auto-flow logic in it. The client will NOT control/determine wrapping, for example. It just "dumbly" plots vectors linearly based on the specified scale.

Note that similar traits are one reason PDF lives on. HTML is too finicky and inconsistent with regard to client-side renderers. PDF's look almost identical on all client-side devices (with a few exceptions), at least proportion-wise. You don't get different wrapping breaks on different clients.

"Web Programmer"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bwwwwaaaahahahahahahaha that's NOT programming. It's formatting text and placing pictures and at most issuing script commands someone built for you to put SQL strings into. Do a lot of pointer work or memory allocation/deallocation in 'web programming', omnichad? How about actual algorithm work you coded yourself omnichad? No to each of course. It's not programming omnichad. Wake up from your massive SELF delusion that what you do is "programming".