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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.
Javascript run version of dosbox emulating computer to run windows/apps.
Just pick your application to run here:
https://archive.org/details/so...
My other signature is a car
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.
The actual link to the archive is: https://archive.org/details/so...
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.