Windows 95 Is Now An App You Can Download and Install On macOS, Windows, and Linux (theverge.com)

Slack developer Felix Rieseberg has made Windows 95 into an electron app that you can run on macOS, Windows, and Linux. The source code and app installers are available on GitHub. According to The Verge, "apps like Wordpad, phone dialer, MS Paint, and Minesweeper all run like you'd expect," but "Internet Explorer isn't fully functional as it simply refused to load pages." From the report: The app is only 129MB in size and you can download it over at Github for both macOS and Windows. Once it's running it surprisingly only takes up around 200MB of RAM, even when running all of the old Windows 95 system utilities, apps, and games. If you run into any issues with the app you can always reset the Windows 95 instance inside the app and start over again. Enjoy this quirky trip down memory lane.

Comments

No new & pure web emulators more interesting

[ReneR]

Nothing really new, emulator "apps" could be loaded for ages, I find the original web browser emulator tech way more interesting, useful and convenient: https://bellard.org/jslinux/ This is basically nothing new and just a browser slapped with the existing emulator code slapped together,

Re:No new & pure web emulators more interestin

[ReneR]

PS: looks like it is simply based on v86.js by Fabian Hemmer: https://github.com/copy/v86

Sad

[lucasnate1]

I find it sad that an OS from 95 offered roughly the same functionality offered today but took much less space. Our tech is degrading.

(And yes, I know about faster internet and better security, that is still not a good enough excuse)

Re: Sad

[that this is not und]

'Much less space'??

We would often dun Windows 95 vack then on systems that had 4 or 8 Meg of RAM and an 80 MB hard drive.

Re: Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, I kinda like having full USB support. Otherwise, sure, win95 is ok.

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Want to know something funny?
See something like Google Maps or other web-apps? They should be capable of running on a Win95-era machine easily.
Want to know why they don't?
Because Google developers are trash-tier developers that wrap their code in deeply-nested enclosures for no sane reason.
Want to know what's the worst thing to do in JavaScript?
Wrapping functions in deeply-nested enclosures.
T R A S H

I know this as a fact because I used to be able to use Google Maps on an old netbook. Now I can't. The newer update that came out a few years back is horribly optimized. It lags like ass. Street View is impossible to use. It runs at sub-1FPS. It never used to.
Likewise, so does Youtube. The mobile player works perfectly fine, but the full media player is insanely slow, even when it is playing 144p video. I don't know who wrote that shit, but they should be fired.
I can run Youtube 1080 streams over Hooktube better than I can on Youtube. More evidence to the point that their sites coders are shit.
The funniest thing is Google Maps developers said the site now looks better. Does it fuck. It's a pixelated mess! All the imagery is noisy as fuck when you zoom in now. Still, give credit where credit is due, at least it actually contains more up-to-date imagery now! They got off their ass and bought new imagery that almost every other mapping site has had for 5 years.

Deep inheritance and deep enclosure chains are the worst thing in ANY language, actually. It doesn't matter what you use.
Even with JavaScript and its prototype model, it still suffers horribly from it.
Even with all the great optimizations that have happened over the years with JIT'd JS, it still can't do this well.
It's a horrible meme I wish would die.
If you own a business, ban developers from using it. It's horrible. It's the worst thing to happen to software development. Not only that, it takes so much longer to develop because it's a pain in the ass trying to keep track of what the fuck does what.
You should never go more than 3 layers deep in ANYTHING, whether it is nested loops, functions or object inheritance. The only excuse is if you are using complex dimensions like that required in physics, machine learning, etc. But there are better ways.

Some people call this "progress", I call it retard developers that shouldn't be in the industry in the first place because software development has been artificially inflated with shit job roles thanks to the UML-kiddie generation of programmers. Not only that, it has been flooded by developers who have, at most, a summer-courses worth of experience with software development. India is infamous for this. It shits out low-quality developers like this.
Making your code worse is not progress!

Re: Sad

[lucasnate1]

You are right, but 200Megs is still penauts in comparison to how much memory is used today.

Re: Sad

[justthinkit]

My favorite Windows install was on the laptops used by two developers we hired. They ran Windows 3.x on 1MB machines so that they could then run their development environment -- Multi Edit (for DOS) and a DOS shell where the finished ap could be run/tested -- all at the same time. Seemed insane. Worked.

Re: Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Today, the Facebook app is 496.1 MB.

Re:Sad

[jellomizer]

Our Tech isn't degrading.
Windows 95, Crashed on the slightest off glance, memory thrashing, memory leaks or buffer overflow can take control of your system, but you didn't even need to do that level of attack because in order to operate it properly you needed to run Windows 95 as Admin otherwise most applications and external hardware will not work. That is why Microsoft had 2 versions of Windows going on at the same time Windows 95 and Windows NT 4. NT was much larger and better designed to handle many of the stability problems, but it was expensive and took a lot of space and needed more advanced computers.

There is a lot of internal fixes beyond Multi-tasking + GUI Shell, which Windows 95 was essentially was at the time. Enhanced memory, protection, better networking stacks, driver modules that can offer hardware support under tighter restrictions.

Plus hardware has changed a lot from the 386/486 days. GPU (even cheap ones) are very powerful. RAM use to be a scarce commodity now we have it in excess, CPU are rarely ever single core. This means design priorities have shifted, this may make some bloat but also to allow things that required a lot of custom low level programming during the Windows 95 days.

I am not saying there hasn't been any useless bloat because they could get away with it. But there is a lot of internal stuff that is needed to make things better.

Heck MSDOS 3 would be installed on a double density 360kb floppy. With room for a custom autoexec.bat and perhaps a custom executable. But DOS was in essence a very simple OS, which took the .COM files and just replaced the binary and wrote it on top of the memory to be executed. or a little extra work with the .EXE files.

We can make tiny OS's today. The problem is we cannot use them on today's networked environment

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I agree with everything you've said. Seems like for every
(software) step forward, we take about 3 steps backwards.

CAP === 'explains'

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Want to know something funny?
See something like Google Maps or other web-apps? They should be capable of running on a Win95-era machine easily.
Want to know why they don't?
Because Google developers are trash-tier developers that wrap their code in deeply-nested enclosures for no sane reason.
Want to know what's the worst thing to do in JavaScript?
Wrapping functions in deeply-nested enclosures.
T R A S H

You almost had me fulled there. Almost sounded like you knew what you were talking about,

Then you referred to Javascript closures as "enclosures" multiple times and I realized I was reading a rant from a clueless idiot.

Re:Sad

[slashcross]

Our Tech isn't degrading. Windows 95, Crashed on the slightest off glance, memory thrashing, memory leaks or buffer overflow can take control of your system, but you didn't even need to do that level of attack because in order to operate it properly you needed to run Windows 95 as Admin otherwise most applications and external hardware will not work.

You're being much too generous. You didn't "need to run Windows 95 as Admin", there was no access control in the system at all for running applications. The closest you got to access control was that you could set a password on network shares. The login process only switched you to your own profile.

Re:Sad

[mkoenecke]

Ah, that explains it: I always wondered why Google Hangouts video chat had such pathetic performance! Poor coding.

Re: Sad

[Anne Thwacks]

Today, the Facebook app is 496.1 MB.

It is not easy to squeeze so much phoning home into such a small footprint you know.

Re: Sad

[DarkRookie]

Today, the Facebook app is 496.1 MB.

Holy fuck

Re:Sad

[LynnwoodRooster]

Want to know something funny? See something like Google Maps or other web-apps? They should be capable of running on a Win95-era machine easily. Want to know why they don't? Because Google developers are trash-tier developers that wrap their code in deeply-nested enclosures for no sane reason. Want to know what's the worst thing to do in JavaScript? Wrapping functions in deeply-nested enclosures. T R A S H

You almost had me fulled there. Almost sounded like you knew what you were talking about,

Then you referred to Javascript closures as "enclosures" multiple times and I realized I was reading a rant from a clueless idiot.

You almost had me fulled there. Almost sounded like you knew what you were talking about,

Then you screwed up the quoting and failed to realize it at the preview I realized I was reading a rant from a clueless idiot.

Re:Sad

[bytestorm]

At that time, the trick wasn't to get applications to run with their own permissions, it was to keep them running in ring 3 w/o overwriting your OS, libraries, page tables, or accessing any PIO registers that could crash the system in new and surprising ways. It was still the wild west of windows memory management and process isolation.

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

And if the login window was even enabled, you could hit cancel or escape to get the default profile.
I didn't have a username, not needed on a personal computer.

Amusingly Windows XP had more problems on the open Internet. I had it catch the worm that rebooted computers (it keeps the default grace period, you could run shutdown -a)
Windows 98SE did catch nasties when using Internet Explorer this all ceased when I installed Firefox 0.5 - which blocked popups. Remember when popup blockers were a thing? And when news sites served porn ads. I may remember wrong but it was seemingly so. I would gladly go back to porn popups if this meant comfortable browsing on 128MB RAM again.

Re:Sad

[thegarbz]

I find it sad that an OS from 95 offered roughly the same functionality offered today but took much less space. Our tech is degrading.

You only find that sad because you remember nothing about the OS from 95.

Re: Sad

[thegarbz]

It's less than 10MB on my phone. It's amazing how small Facebook can be when you strip the animations, video playback, streaming, gaming, marketplace, and all that other completely worthless shit out of it.

I'm sure it still phones home like all the others but for anyone interested: https://play.google.com/store/...

Re: Sad

[thegarbz]

Today, the Facebook app is 496.1 MB.

Windows 95 doesn't include a web browser. The Facebook app (for reasons stupid as heck) does.

Re:Sad

[CastrTroy]

Exactly. I don't think we need to go back to the days of DOS where every program developer had to include their own sound, music, gamepad/joystick, modem, and network drivers in every single piece of software they made. People who complain about modern operating systems really don't know how bad things were back in the day. I haven't had my computer crash on me in over a year. It used to crash weekly, if no daily, on Windows XP/98/95/3.1 machines. I don't recall DOS ever crashing, but that had a whole lot of other problems because it was so simple.

Re: Sad

[SirSlud]

Roughly the same functionality like a horse and buggy basically doses what a car does. How's your horse?

Re:Sad

[silverkniveshotmail.]

I never thought I'd live to see the day that a /. user looked back on Win9x through rose tinted glasses and was modded up.

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't "need to run Windows 95 as Admin", there was no access control in the system at all for running applications.

Sorry, but what exactly is the difference? How is "you must run as an Admin" different from "there is no such thing as a non-Admin"?

Re:Sad

[JMJimmy]

While he may not know what he's talking about entirely, he's not wrong about the shitty updates.

YouTube was updated to a depreciated set of functions, making it run well on Chrome but nothing else. Google Maps became significantly slower/less user-friendly and somehow big commercial locations seem to be popping up on unrelated searches while mom & pops only show up if you zoom in to basically their location.

Re: Sad

[jdschulteis]

My favorite Windows install was on the laptops used by two developers we hired. They ran Windows 3.x on 1MB machines so that they could then run their development environment -- Multi Edit (for DOS) and a DOS shell where the finished ap could be run/tested -- all at the same time. Seemed insane. Worked.

DESQview might have been a better choice. Several colleagues and I used it in much the same way as your two devs, with Brief as the text editor instead of Multi-Edit.

Re: Sad

[iampiti]

Yeah, I've been using Lite since I had a space constrained phone and since I'm not a heavy or advanced Facebook user it's enough for me.
Being so small it's probably just a thin wrapper over the mobile site.
Anyway, many (Twitter does for example) apps have "lite" versions for resource constrained phones. Sadly, they're only (officially) available on developing countries. I guess the reason is to force users in developed nations to use the "big" versions which have much more spying so that the company can make lots of money.

Re: Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Today, the Facebook app is 496.1 MB.

Windows 95 doesn't include a web browser. The Facebook app (for reasons stupid as heck) does.

Yeah, but isn't it just API calls? Or, as I expect, do they embed a few huge libraries in it?

Re:Sad

[Bite The Pillow]

Windows 10 has so much drift to support the touch interface. You have two different places to configure the system, and different rules, between Settings and Control Panel. It has two independent web browsers. Code to support a ridiculous number of options on how to display file icons in the Explorer view.

These are just a few examples of the unnecessary bloat. If the unused garbage were thrown out, Windows 10 could be lean and mean. ReactOS is architecturally similar, based on Vista, but it's lighter and almost functionally equivalent.

It can be done smaller, and that was the original point. Windows 95 was tiny, and accomplished basically the same tasks. Fixing its problems can be done without the bloat, proven by ReactOS. Microsoft just isn't willing to commit to a pure UI refresh cycle to reactor everything to use a consistent look, throwing away duplicate functionality so everything similar runs through the same pipeline.

Of course if they did it would all be touch and keyboards might well be archaic tech at that point.

Re:Sad

[hey!]

You have a skin-deep view of the OS, and on that level you're actually right. Windows 95 UI is *similar* to modern version of Windows, and could reasonably be argued to be *better*, but Windows 95 isn't as good an OS. In fact it barely qualifies as an operating system at all. It relied on MS-DOS for a lot of the heavy lifting, which is why a simulation can be so small; you just trap the DOS hardware interrupts and translate them into Unix syscalls.

Windows 95 was something between an operating system and what we'd call a lightweight window manager. It's a low-resource kludge that existed because the average computer being sold at the time had 4MB of RAM, and Windows NT required 16 MB, which practically nobody had. Modern "lightweight" linux window managers typically call for 4 MB of RAM and most would not work on hardware of that era at all.

Now on the actual OS level lots of stuff that's been added since then that's pretty important. There's Unicode support, for example, and 64 bit computing. ACPI could be better than it is, but remember that Windows 95 had *no* power management and its hotplug capabilities were crude and only worked part of the time. There's security features like ASLR and better kernel process isolation. And modern Windows is much easier to manage for sysadmins.

But while OSs have got better, desktop UIs haven't, and for a good reason: every modern desktop system embodies an 1990s view of the desktop: as the main repository of your data and the digital switchboard for your life. That all went out the window in 2008, when the iPhone was introduced. Most of the UI "innovations" made since 2000 in UIs have been of limited or no use to most people. Remember Vista's Windows Gadgets? That would have been wildly popular in 1995, but in 2009 when Windows 7 came in they pulled the plug and nobody noticed.

Re:Sad

[jellomizer]

"but it's lighter and almost functionally equivalent."

Almost is the key problem. Anyone with any Software development experience knows getting that last 1% of functionality takes 90% of the time and effort. Often a lot of space and resources.

ReactOS also doesn't have the target audience of a general computer user. There are tiny details that can be left out, because it doesn't effect compatibility. The bloat such has to display a file icon while may seem silly for you as the default is good enough. But having upgraded my system with a 4k display, I found the defaults need to be changed to make the screen usable. Having the bloat to properly expand graphics and text so everything fits is important, because otherwise it would be impossible to use the newer system. Without scaling Standard Text with a 10px by 10px character is the size of a pixel on the old CGA-VGA graphics mode of 320x240. Heck with a the extended ASCII Set you can probably in Textmode duplicate 640x480 display.

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

No one, and I mean no one, actually wants to pay developers the amounts, or have the number of developers working on it, to have that kind of optimization any more.

Re:Sad

[amicusNYCL]

I find it sad that an OS from 95 offered roughly the same functionality offered today but took much less space. Our tech is degrading.

(And yes, I know about faster internet and better security, that is still not a good enough excuse)

Wait, what? "Faster internet" is a feature of more recent operating systems? And you "know" about this "faster internet?" Haha. Wow, you really know about operating systems, don't you? Better mod you right the hell up.

The only thing that Windows 95 has in common with Windows 7 or 10 is that they both let you install and run programs. Turns out that's a major part of being an operating system.

Re:Sad

[argStyopa]

Not to mention: how would you implant DRM sufficient to satisfy the MPAA/RIAA paymasters in a tinyOS? Clearly not "technically" possible....for broad enough priorities of "technically"...

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if Google Earth desktop version has been killed off for good yet, but it works perfectly fine on a netbook, even if it's in damn 3D and requires a 3D accelerator.
I think it does, or did Streetview. It did on my desktop at a fucking 100 images per second.
Google Earth does not display photos on the map anymore (they killed the servers for this).

Re:Sad

[amicusNYCL]

I don't recall DOS ever crashing

That's an interesting point, I don't think I remember either just being on a command prompt and having the computer crash. Applications would crash, and might require a reboot, but I don't recall DOS itself ever going down in flames.

Re: Sad

[wwphx]

Earlier this week I once again looked in to the Brief clone marketplace and was rather amazed at what was there compared to a few years ago, including Mac and Linux offerings! I'm planning on checking out a couple soon. Feature-wise, they looked quite impressive. It'll be interesting to see if my fingers remember any shortcuts from the '90s. And I recently came across my Brief manuals! Pity I couldn't find the floppies.

Now if I could find a clone of Sourcerer's Apprentice!

Re:Sad

[sremick]

Bloat is a far bigger issue than you make out. Windows 95 took up around 55MB of disk space. The Capital One banking app on Android is 104MB.

Devs are just lazy, plain and simple. Computers would be amazingly fast if the same TLC and discipline were applied to storage and memory usage these days as was in the 1990s.

Re: Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

>fulled
Want to know how I know you're an angry indian Google employee, Ramesh?

Re: Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Today, the Facebook app is 496.1 MB.

Exactly the same as the entire Puppy Linux OS.

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Except they have the same API (for files, GUI, processes and almost everything else) but with unicode support. So, my friend, they have a lot in common. It is like Linux 2.0 and 4.18. It is still linux and share a lot of a common base, it is programmed the same way, just with a better written kernel and libs.

Re:Sad

[Darinbob]

Don't forget, it ran faster too.

Re:Sad

[gordguide]

I've got a Mac Powerbook 180c ... the first colour screen laptop in the world ... which runs Photoshop v2.5 and Microsoft Word v4 with 2.5 MB of installed RAM, running System 7.5, a contemporary OS to Win95. Everything works except the batteries (NiCads) so it has to be plugged into AC all the time. It networks with my contemporary laptop and desktop ... making things like access to Floppy Disks on modern hardware and software possible.

But, yeah, two and a half megabytes of RAM is enough for a pretty modern OS ... MacOS didn't change much from System7.5 to OS9, save for new hard disk formats that better supported larger drives.

Re:Sad

[jellomizer]

I had it crashed often with a bad floppy was inserted, or a poorly made TSR was in play.
Sometimes it would crash if I held down a key for too long, as the keyboard repeat action was faster then what the computer could handle.

However those who didn't have hard disks at the time. Often when running a program after quitting out you will
"Insert a disk with command.com" because most of DOS was overwritten by the application.

That said, windows would normally run fine just as long as you don't run any application either.

Re:Sad

[Scoth]

That's a bit like saying you've never seen a bicycle blow a head gasket whereas cars do. On a stock DOS install there was very little there to crash. You didn't have layers of drivers constantly in use, dozens of background processes, constant drive and network accesses, etc etc. You might have a sound driver that spent most of its time idle, maybe a mouse driver, and if you were super-fancy a network driver, but that was about it. Once you started adding TSRs and stuff like software VESA drivers, DOS did get a bit more unstable.

Re: Sad

[thegarbz]

I'm both heavy and advanced Facebook user and it's enough for me. Seriously you get the "full" Facebook experience without the shit in the normal app.

Re:Sad

[jellomizer]

there is some additional things as well. A modern "Premium" Phone has an HD-4k display So up to 32 Megs can be used just for a background image. Then being a Java like App there is a lot of overhead vs being compiled in a straight Assembly. Because otherwise you LG phone vs your Samsung phone just may not work.

Re: Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice.

My lowest RAM system is 32 MB, Pentium II. I have it running the latest NetBSD but I always have to custom compile the kernel to get it small enough. Amazingly enough I run a full xdesktop using Fluxbox as a WM and I control it remotely using VNC too. I always have conky and a news reader loaded on the screen too.

It's amazing how much unnecessary bloat exists in modern software.

Re:Sad

[Scoth]

In a properly-running Windows 95, DOS was hardly used at all. There's a blog post that was even on Slashdot awhile back talking about it. It didn't really do any "heavy lifting" unless there was a legacy driver installed.

Windows 95 also supported APM just fine. I believe Win95C supported ACPI, but I'd have to double check that - but Windows 98 did support ACPI just fine. I had a couple Win95 laptops back in the day that did PC Card hot swapping just fine, although I didn't use it super extensively. So anecdotal there.

Re:Sad

[amicusNYCL]

No, it's not like that. Windows 95 runs on top of DOS. That died with Windows ME. Everything after ME, including XP, is built on NT, not DOS.

The API is not the same either, there are many things to point to in more recent Windows APIs that are not present in Windows 95. The Windows 95 API is, at best, a subset of the current Windows API. Trying to suggest that the OS or API hasn't changed much in the past 23 years is a bit disingenuous.

The most obvious example is the fact that filenames on DOS-based systems are limited to the 8.3 format.

Re:Sad

[hey!]

I think ACPI came in in Win 98. Win 95 did have hot swapping, but it wasn't autoconfigured; you had to manage it in the installer program.

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

> I've got a Mac Powerbook 180c ... the first colour screen laptop in the world ...

According to Wikipedia, the 165c preceded it. I believe Toshiba had a laptop at least a year before that with a 256-color display.

Re:Sad

[Scoth]

I'm not sure if by DOS-based you mean literally just DOS or Win9x/ME, but Windows 95 supports long file names. It was one of the big new features for it, although it did (as Windows still does by default) autogenerate a short file name such as the infamous c:\Progra~1.

Re:Sad

[amicusNYCL]

Right, that's what I was referring to. It does show long names in the GUI, but if you look at the filesystem they're all 8.3.

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact remains that people don't know how to program any more. Programmers from the 80s and 90s were infinitely superior at writing code. Nowadays all software "developers" do is trial and error "agile development", making end users do their QA testing for them (sometimes even CHARGING users money to do it instead of PAYING users like they used to) and sticking together code snippets that they don't even understand the workings of.

In the 80s and 90s, programmers actually knew machine code and could write complex software in a few KB. Today "programmers" use slow, multi GB libraries just to do "hello world" and they don't even understand how or why it works.

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Win95 supported long item names which it pretended were filenames. ^_^

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

So is that why there is the COMSPEC variable? I always wondered why the hell would you ever need to change the command.com location.

Had a 386SX with 2MB RAM as the first PC, had such machines been available with floppy only (like Amiga 500) probably putting DOS stuff in ramdisk would have been popular. But the lowest of machines had a hard disk :). Mandatory for Windows 3.0 and 3.1

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Did it still have GUI stuff in ROM? If so, that helped.

People badmouthed the classic MacOS before me. Fun to think of OS9 as a kind of pretty Windows 3.11. But I don't argue too much about stuff that works.

Re: Sad

[justthinkit]

I was the DESQview guy -- and it was way too unstable for me.

Their system involved a swap that might take...a while...but other than that they could have DevEnv, Compiler (Clipper), BLink, Application all a few keystrokes away.

There was a time when we appreciated a pause here and there. Time for a coffee or bathroom break. Today we drink K-Cups that take 30 seconds to brew, suck a few times on our vape cigarette and we're back to work much too soon.

Re: Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Bu' we got da minesweeper, man! Wee don' need no steenkin' browsers!

Re: Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Then just use a browser, xhich is conveniently installed on most phones, and will use several purpose

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Win10 is a bit like 95, but for some reason the boss' kid was allowed to redesign the graphics, and some flake from marketting sprayed his corrosive, buzzladen b.s. non-ideas all over the place. And it spies on my every move.

Oh, and I could run 95 on an ex-uni dumpster dived 486, surfing the web on an ne2k coax network card and keeping everything on a hdd measured in MBs. What's the min spec for win10 again?

Re:Sad

[angel'o'sphere]

Windows 95, Crashed on the slightest off glance, memory thrashing, memory leaks or buffer overflow can take control of your system, but you didn't even need to do that level of attack because in order to operate it properly you needed to run Windows 95 as Admin otherwise most applications and external hardware will not work.
That is nonsense.
Both Win95 and Win98 were extremely stable, and I never ran any computer as admin, regardless what OS. Never any problems with that.

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

in order to operate it properly you needed to run Windows 95 as Admin

No, you didn't. There was no Admin account, because there were no user accounts at all.

with BSODs and everything?

[Anonymous Coward]

nice

".. only 200MB"

[scsirob]

OK, so let me get this right. Windows-95 ran fine on real hardware with 4MB of memory, and 16MB on a high-end system. And now this guy is delighted to have the same stuff running in 'only 200MB'??

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Anonymous Coward]

He should get off our lawn... As soon as I can reboot my Windows 95 lawnmower, I'll get him for sure.

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be given how things are bloated with modern apps and applications because of resource glut. He obviously could do better but given the tools he had that might not be the case to support the thing properly because of the toolkit he used to build everything.

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole thing appears to be a collection of Java scripts. Taking that into account 200MB memory footprint isn't half bad.

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, so let me get this right. Windows-95 ran fine on real hardware with 4MB of memory, and 16MB on a high-end system. And now this guy is delighted to have the same stuff running in 'only 200MB'??

You've clearly never dealt with "electron app developers". Logic has no place in their world, they're almost as fanatic as ruby devs talking about sharding.

Calling something an "electron app" is like saying RPM app or deb app. It's piggybacking your ad (in this case hype) - onto something else. I don't necessarily blame the dev here as it's a neat idea but there is an entire generation that has no clue what the difference is nor the legal ramifications.

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, so let me get this right. Windows-95 ran fine on real hardware with 4MB of memory, and 16MB on a high-end system. And now this guy is delighted to have the same stuff running in 'only 200MB'??

200 MB harddrive space not memory but still

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Parker Lewis]

To no enter the merit of Electron for UI and JS for virtualization being a good or bad choice, keep in mind that we're talking about 2 layers of SOFTWARE "virtualization" here: one is x86 platform, build on v86.js; which is written in JS, a language that requires a virtual machine to run (not to mention the host OS). Basically the same reason why you need much more resources to run your emulated SNES game than the real hardware.

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Anonymous Coward]

ITYM "javascript scripts", since java is still something completely different than javascript. And electron is a pile of javascript crap, not java crap.

On the upside, maybe it's not too hard to translate the useful bits from that pile of crap into something sensible. Maybe FORTH, running on a nice and small FORTH implementation. (Mine's 8kB on disk. And it doesn't need a standard C library, which is many megabytes itself these days.)

Re:".. only 200MB"

[jellomizer]

Running fine is subjective. But to emulate there is overhead... A lot of overhead.

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a common rule of thumb that a system emulating another one requires at least 10 times the resources of the original system.

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, no. TFS has it right there for you:
"Once it's running it surprisingly only takes up around 200MB of RAM"

You could at least try to read before posting

most of which is the ramdisk

Re:".. only 200MB"

[squiggleslash]

In practice, while 4Mb was the official memory floor, it definitely needed a hell of a lot more than 4Mb. 16Mb in practice was the absolute minimum. 3.1 could just about work in 4Mb but it was barely usable with that little RAM.

I had a computer at the time of its release with 8Mb and didn't install '95 because I knew it wouldn't work.

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Anonymous Coward]

It runs on Electron, which is some kind of google chrome runtime, whatever. This is for people who think 500MB RAM for a chat program is great.
So, 200MB is probably close to the footprint of hello world.

Re:".. only 200MB"

[damn_registrars]

3.1 could just about work in 4Mb but it was barely usable with that little RAM.

That depends on what you were doing in 3.1. I had a 386 (SX, no less) with only 2mb and it ran 3.1 just fine. Word and Excel 5.0 worked fine in there, we dialed up (originally with a 2400 baud modem) using Prodigy for windows and that worked too. With 4mb I could load win32s and winG to really extend what it was capable of (though by then I upgraded to a 486DX2).

(windows 95) In practice, while 4Mb was the official memory floor, it definitely needed a hell of a lot more than 4Mb. 16Mb in practice was the absolute minimum.

I disagree with that as well. There was plenty you could do in 95 with 4mb, even if some of it may have been a little unpleasant unless you had at least 8. Now if you "upgraded" to win98 (and god help you if you fell for the atrocious first version) then you couldn't do anything useful until you had 8mb, but your applications usually crashed unless you had at least 16.

Re:".. only 200MB"

[thegarbz]

Emulation has costs.

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think my computer would handle SNES on javascript.
NES works, or Wolfenstein 3D, but I also ran a NES emulator on a pitifully outdated 486 SX 25. (a gameboy emulator too, no$gmb. very good and impressive)

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you aware of the difference between install size (formerly known as disk space) and memory size (also known as RAM usage)?

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 95 didn't run fine on 4MB, 16MB was a minimum... I used to run it on a machine with 12MB and thrashed to buggery and was impossibly slow.

Re:".. only 200MB"

[iampiti]

That's because he's probably a clueless kid with a smartphone that has 4 GB of RAM and so he's surprised something so cool can run on just 200 MB

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember getting a demo of this "World Wide Web" thingy from one of our network guys, on a 486 running the brand-spanking-new Windows 95.

He opened a small HTML file in Notepad and I could hear the hard drive grinding as it paged. Not cool.

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Anonymous Coward]

That 200MB is the disk space used, not the RAM! In this case it's confusing because the "disk" is loaded into memory.

dom

Re:".. only 200MB"

[fedos]

It's 200 MB when running all built-in applications simultaneously.

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Anonymous Coward]

That depends on what you were doing in 3.1. I had a 386 (SX, no less) with only 2mb and it ran 3.1 just fine.

I find that hard to believe based on my own experience.

My girlfriend at the time ('93) had bought a Windows machine running 3.11 on a 486 that had 4MB of RAM. Once you booted, opening even a single Word document would cause the damned thing to thrash and become unusable, and frequently crash.

After about two weeks after she got it she asked me to wipe it and install Linux like I had on mine (she was another CS major).

On the same hardware, a Linux machine was faster and far more responsive, and could do useful work. In fact, it could run laps around a Windows machine. You could run X-windows, TeX, a DVI Viewer, Mosaic, and be downloading via FTP over SLIP, all while compiling code C code. Windows would have long since thrown up its hands and curled up into a ball.

I had at least 3 of my CS profs and a couple of physics majors ask me to install it onto their machines as well, because they had Windows 3.x on their desktops, and utterly hated it. They all absolutely loved Linux and what they could do with it.

Windows 3.x was a complete turd, and with 2MB of RAM is basically thrashed itself to death. So either you had a low threshold for "good", or you had far better results from it than I ever saw. My experience was a machine with those specs was a completely unusable thing using Windows.

Re:".. only 200MB"

[Gavagai80]

I ran Windows '95 on a machine with 8 MB RAM for many years. No problems. It didn't even crash much, probably because it didn't have internet or much else complicated to do.

Red Hat Linux 6, on the other hand, was unable to run a GUI due to the lack of RAM on that machine.

Re:".. only 200MB"

[angel'o'sphere]

Get a damn clue.
It is written in JavaScript.

No one is forcing you to use it ...

Re:".. only 200MB"

[angel'o'sphere]

I had a computer at the time of its release with 8Mb and didn't install '95 because I knew it wouldn't work.
Then you knew wrong. It had ran happily in 4MB, too. And with 8MB it would not swap, unless you had strong requirements. I developed in C++ and later in Java on it (16MB). There never was any problem.

Details

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the crappy coverage slashdot. What are we talking about here, is it a full-blown x86 machine emulation with Windows 95 installed? Is it a ReactOS style Windows 95-compatible environment packaged as an app? Is it just a toy app that looks like Win95 with some default apps? Is the selling point of this just that it's easier to install than setting up a Windows 95 VM? ISTR someone already did a browser-based Win95 emulation years ago. Is it legal?

Come on, give me *something*.

Re:Details

[Anonymous Coward]

No need, it just doesn't boot. Hangs there forever, probably mining bitcoins.

Re:Details

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we get you to write the article summaries instead? :)

Re:Details

[Anonymous Coward]

We as readers come here to RTFS and spend our time in the comments.
That's not what Slashdot wants, nor the marketing companies that submit most of the summaries.

Re:Details

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an illegal copy of Windows 95 some guy packaged and bundled with an emulator and a javascript/html stack for desktop software.
It appears to be a full blown x86 emulator in javascript, we don't care about the slow because 95 will run on the lowest end CPU you could find in... 1995.
The javascript/html5 stack is the one used by Visual Studio Code and other software. So it handles display, input etc. with no work needed.

It's a exercise in copy-paste as far as I can tell.
I think there was "Windows 95 on a smarwatch!!" before, which I think can be achieved with dosbox for android.

Re:Details

[blind biker]

I agree, I couldn't make heads or tail out of that summary. This was egregiously low effort, even for a Slashdot editor.

Re:Details

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you think that in theory? He's a complete moron?

256 colors!!!!

[Daralantan]

Does it let you relive the glory of 256 colors?

Re:256 colors!!!!

[jrumney]

Does it let you relive the glory of 256 colors?

Yes, but if you want to stretch it out to its full hi-res 800x600 glory you have to stick with 16 to avoid running out of memory on the emulated VESA graphics card.

Re:256 colors!!!!

[jellomizer]

Get off the my Lawn you new age Hippy!
Back in my day, I had CGA on one of these fancy RGB displays, This gave me 16 colors in Text mode, and 4 Colors in Graphics mode. These 4 colors wern't even good 4 colors.
Default Pallet:
Cyan Magenta White Black*
Secondary Pallet:
Green Red Brown Black*
*Well black can be swapped with 1 of 16 background colors
We can have brighter versions where the Magenta became a light red. and Brown become Yellow.
But you rarely ever had any good color combinations.

And I was the lucky one, as most of my peers only had monochrome displays (which I actually liked because it gave you 16 shades of gray (amber, green) ) That actually made the graphs look better.

Re:256 colors!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it let you relive the glory of 256 colors?

Yes, but if you want to stretch it out to its full hi-res 800x600 glory you have to stick with 16 to avoid running out of memory on the emulated VESA graphics card.

My first computer (8088) had a built-in 2-tone monitor (green / black, black/white, or amber/black) and an external CGA monitor. As I recall, the CGA monitor could do 16 or 8 colors, depending on resolution. The machine was amazing: 1 MB RAM, 20 MB HD, 8 MHz CPU (we rarely used the 12 MHz turbo mode).

Re:256 colors!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, just blue.

Missing the best part

[Mordaximus]

The Buddy Holly video from Weezer was far and away the best part of the windows 95 install CD (or was it Plus pack?)

Re: Missing the best part

[Anonymous Coward]

It was in the standard installer CD, along with an Edie Brickell video and Hover.

Re:Missing the best part

[scottrocket]

The Buddy Holly video from Weezer was far and away the best part of the windows 95 install CD (or was it Plus pack?)

Heh, that was the first video I ever ripped from a disc (of any kind), & transcoded to Divx 3.11alpha. Good times.

Re:Missing the best part

[jjthegreat]

The Buddy Holly video from Weezer was far and away the best part of the windows 95 install CD (or was it Plus pack?)

Heh, that was the first video I ever ripped from a disc (of any kind), & transcoded to Divx 3.11alpha. Good times.

Good times indeed! Just reminded me of the other insipid song that came on the win95 CD https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Missing the best part

[iampiti]

At that time I thought the video (encoded in MPEG 1 Video) looked amazing. It also helped that the song was great and so I watched that video many times.

Re: Missing the best part

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, my Windows 95 CD had Good Times by Edie Brickell, and Buddy Holly by Weezer.

Hover was awesome. :)

Re: Missing the best part

[Iwastheone]

Nice! Thanks for the trip down memory lane, AC. :)

Now that's a GREAT emulator

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

...but "Internet Explorer isn't fully functional as it simply refused to load pages."

So, just like the Win95 Real Thing then.

Re:Now that's a GREAT emulator

[jrumney]

I imagine with today's webpages, IE 3 (or whatever the last version was that ran on Windows 95) would cause a bluescreen with a heap overflow before it had finished parsing all the Javascript.

Re:Now that's a GREAT emulator

[lgw]

...but "Internet Explorer isn't fully functional as it simply refused to load pages."

So, just like the Win95 Real Thing then.

Hey now, in the late 90s IE was the king of browsers, and was for many years. There's a reason IE had grown to market dominance by the time IE6 came out, and it wasn't just bundling - IE3 (1995) was good for its time. IE4 (1997) was just better than the competition, and knocked Netscape Navigator off it's throne.

Remember, early versions of Netscape Navigator weren't free, and had their own embarrassing security holes. It's advantage was "not Microsoft", not actually being better. It wasn't until Firefox come out (2004) that there was an open source, legitimately better browser to compete with IE.

Re:Now that's a GREAT emulator

[The MAZZTer]

The VM has no network adapter. So, no internet.

Re:Now that's a GREAT emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you try starting winsock?

Re:Now that's a GREAT emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

Even with network adapter it won't work great or at all, the SSL lib in Win9x browsers (IE, FF) are terribly out of date. Many websites like Google refuse to talk to ancient SSL impls.

Why would anyone do that?

[volodymyrbiryuk]

nt

You now have more gift choices...

[Anonymous Coward]

...for the sado-masochist in your life:
-Leather collar
-Really big dildo
-Win 95 app

Netscape 1.0

[houghi]

If you want to run Netscape on it : http://houghi.org/Fun/Netscape...

Somehwre I must still have the floppy with Trumpet Winsock on it as well as Eudora.

To be fair, I really like the first version of Windows 95. The one without IE. After that I went to Linux, so no idea how the rest is.

Re:Netscape 1.0

[freeze128]

Why would you need Trumpet Winsock? Windows 95 already has a TCP/IP stack, and Dial-up networking support.

Re:Netscape 1.0

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, Windows 95 didn't actually have TCP/IP installed by default. You had to install it, and it's usefulness was somewhat limited. SLIP/PPP configuration in particular I remember having trouble with, but that was a long time ago and my memory may not be accurate.

progress!

[sad_]

only 129MB large and only 200MB of ram needed... for windows 95.
that's more then 20 years of progress for you, right there!

Re:progress!

[Anonymous Coward]

it very likely loads the entire filesystem into ram

Re:progress!

[Anonymous Coward]

only 129MB large and only 200MB of ram needed... for windows 95.
that's more then 20 years of progress for you, right there!

i hear you never run win95 from a ramdisk on your newer computer just for kicks

Re:progress!

[thegarbz]

And can run on any hardware without any drivers and on top of another OS using portable Javascript. Yes that IS progress.

Re:progress!

[Anonymous Coward]

Never thought doing this.
I did run doom 2 on the 6x86 / Pentium PC when it was upgraded to 32MB. The starting speed was awesome on the ramdisk!
But my next PC had an Ultra DMA 33 drive and that was so fast as to make it moot.

Later I ran 98SE with a 120GB IBM 7200 rpm main drive. The motherboard did Ultra DMA 66 but I preferred using old IDE cables as they were more reliable (but stuck at DMA 33) and looked better too. The kind you could still plug upside down and fry your hardware.
Well.. 10 seconds from power up to desktop.
I was good at avoiding crapware. Real player? There were bootleg codecs for realplayer and quicktime so you could play files in Windows Media Player 6.0. (and WMV9 codec from microsoft so you could avoid newer versions of Windows Media Player)

Well one thing is for sure about this app..

[Anonymous Coward]

It's got Windows 10 beat in performance and usability at 200mb.

Details

[DrYak]

Details are in the Github repo which is linked in the slashdot summary.

What are we talking about here, is it a full-blown x86 machine emulation with Windows 95 installed?

Yes, as explained on the README, it's based on https://github.com/copy/v86

Is the selling point of this just that it's easier to install than setting up a Windows 95 VM? ISTR someone already did a browser-based Win95 emulation years ago.

Yup, this basically takes the in-browser emulators written in JS (as you can find many of these to emulate older machine),
but instead of being a webpage you load into your browser, it uses Electron to make an app out of it.

Is it legal?

In theory Microsoft is still around and they still owns the copyright on Win95.
In practice, Microsoft probably barely gives a fuck about such an old OS that they have themselves deprecated so long ago,
and I'm quite sure that over the decades, you've probably ended up owning some license to run it legally (e.g.: as part of a pre-installed laptop, as some MSDN license through your university/your employer, whatever...)
Might even qualify under the "comedy" exception of whatever serves the equivalent of Fair use in your local jurisdiction.

Plus the whole thing is smaller than the giant katamari of javascript libraries loaded by any modern web page any way~~~

Easter Eggs

[dohzer]

Do the Windows 95 Easter Eggs work? That's about all I'd be interested in checking out.

Re:Easter Eggs

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I'll drink to that

I'd like to see Bill Gates dead

Re:Easter Eggs

[Anonymous Coward]

And the Johnny Castaway screensaver.

Re:No new & pure web emulators more interestin

[ledow]

You mean the one that runs this:

https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=w...

Yeah, hardly "new" Slashdot.

Seriously, the quality of technical content vs "hey look this is cool" crap is really putting me off now.

but

[Anonymous Coward]

can you run linux on it?

piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't know that windows 95 was freeware

Copyright?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this distributing Windows 95? That can't be good for the author's wallet in the long term...

Running Windows on Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo dawg, I head you like Windows, so we put Windows in your Windows so you can Window while you Wi...{{{BSOD}}}

200 MB RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 95 made by generation Z hipsters takes 200MB RAM instead of its original humble 4MB. We need some weedwhacking in this industry.

BFD. Vm and Emulators for years

[Anonymous Coward]

Have done this. Not a single bit of this Win95 App is impressive.

Standards

[hcs_$reboot]

"Internet Explorer isn't fully functional as it simply refused to load pages"
It won't load nowadays css and html compliant pages. You have to find one of these old made-for-IE crappy pages.

Re:Standards

[DarkOx]

I suspect the biggest problem (and this is problem even on XP VMs if you build them from sp2 or older media) is that it does not support current TLS protocols. Now that practically everything is HTTPS and everyone has disabled SSL3.x and older because of POODLE and in a lot of cases even TLS1.0 you can't connect to most HTTPS servers

Re:Standards

[iggymanz]

then a proxy should fix that problem.... hmm, win 95 did support https proxies right?

Re:Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

In 2012 Firefox 2.0 on a Windows ME computer still worked

That's about when I found out frigging weird it was on a linux computer, everything up to date but with a dead CMOS battery. This PC believed it was 2003 January 1st I think. This messes majorly with the TLS and it took me some time to find out what was happening. Made youtube all weird and non working (bunch of plain text and white space, with no layout i.e. plain top to bottom)
Bug from hell and no error message tells you dead battery is dead and datetime is wrong by a decade.

Re:Standards

[DarkOx]

Well yes that should work provided you configure your HTTPS proxy to speak those broken protocols. It has to be an HTTPS proxy too can't be HTTP because using the CONNECT method means you are still doing HTTPS directly with the foreign peer.

thank god they did this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally now I can... nope...nevermind

"The app its only 129MB in size"

[mackul]

IIRC Win95 came on 36 (?) 1.44 MB floppy disks and you had to switch them one by one and by hand during the installation. Nice game for a funny afternoon

Re:"The app its only 129MB in size"

[Anonymous Coward]

WIn95 came on like 13 floppies, I'm pretty sure. 15 maybe? OSR2 was more.

Re:"The app its only 129MB in size"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050819-10/?p=34513

And those were thirteen of those special Distribution Media Format floppies, which are specially formatted to hold more data than a normal 1.44MB floppy disc. The high-capacity floppies reduced the floppy count by two, which resulted in a tremendous savings in cost of manufacturing and shipping. ...
For comparison, Windows 3.1 came on six floppies. Windows NT 3.1 came on twenty-two.

Re:"The app its only 129MB in size"

[damn_registrars]

Could you be thinking of OS2 Warp? I'm pretty sure its floppy count was somewhere past 30.

Re:"The app its only 129MB in size"

[Anonymous Coward]

I had Win95 floppies, they were 1.76MB formatted.
We reformatted them to 1.44MB and used them for something more important, like copying doom 2 to five floppies.

They were good floppies for the purpose, and useless anyway if you got a Win95 OSR2 CD-R.

Re:"The app its only 129MB in size"

[Anonymous Coward]

OS/2 2.99 beta was about 20 disks. beyond that - no idea, it came on CD (needed a floppy to boot, iirc)

That's nothing, Maniac Mansion was a game you...

[grungeman]

...could play on the computer found in the Eddy's room in Day of the Tentacle. But you had to go there with Bernard the nerd. Now THAT was cool, and that was in 1993!

Use a hypervisor

[tepples]

If your hypervisor can translate between USB on the host and whatever Windows 95 expects on the guest, there shouldn't be a problem with using USB peripherals with Windows 95. It could present keyboard and mouse as PS/2 and present USB mass storage as a network drive.

(Yes, I'm aware hypervisors didn't exist back then, but they do now.)

Don't make piracy.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is https://www.reactos.org/.

Re:No new & pure web emulators more interestin

[Anonymous Coward]

That shit is slow as fuck.

What "memory lane"?

[mi]

Enjoy this quirky trip down memory lane.

What "memory lane"? I for one have switched to FreeBSD in 1993 — and never looked back...

Ooo Yeah Electron

[DarkRookie]

Win95 is not an app. It is an OS.
Unless that app is a VM in disguise

Also, fuck electron and the bad design chooses that allows.

It doesn't have anywhere near the functionality

[rsilvergun]

A modern browser like IE 11 is practically on OS of it's own. Win 10 also has powershell, which debatable terrible is still a complete programming and automation environment. 95 also didn't have 20 years of drivers packed into it.

Although a lot of features baked into Win 10 are behind a paywall. A better comparison might be a Linux install. There are Tiny Linux installs that get pretty close to that 200mb. But if you're talking about a modern one like Ubuntu (it'll eat about 2gb) you get a mountain of software in there.

Finally...

[Anonymous Coward]

...you can do something useful with Linux.

Did you actually run Windows 95?

[sjbe]

I find it sad that an OS from 95 offered roughly the same functionality offered today but took much less space.

If all you do is some basic office tasks then you might be right. But as soon as you do something as simple as watch a 4K video then your argument blows up because those machines couldn't do it. A single video from my camera could easily fill up the entire hard drive and you could forget about editing it on any machine you could afford to own. Windows 95 was fine for its day but it took less space because it HAD to take less space. In those days a machine with 16MB of RAM was a lot of memory. Access to the internet was mostly via 56K dialup modems. The phone I have in my pocket would run rings around any PC you could buy when Windows 95 was the state of the art.

Our tech is degrading.

Really? That's funny because the PC I'm using to type this is FAR faster, drives three 4K monitors, has way more ram and disk space, has applications that do things we only dreamed of, has gigabit ethernet connected to a internet connection faster than my LAN in 1995. "Degrading"? Either you weren't around for those days or you have some serious rose tint on your glasses. The good old days weren't that good.

Re:Did you actually run Windows 95?

[Anonymous Coward]

The software is definitely degrading. Peak Windows was either 2000 Advanced Server or Server 2003 (if you care about moving drivers to user space). Peak Office was 2003 with no argument at all. Our UI design has gone to shit (the barebones Win 10 UI still hides the Windows 7 UI, which still hides the Win 2000 UI if you really need to set something, and Office follows the same pattern), and everything is crazy slow to offer the same functionality we had 20 years ago. The only thing staying efficient at all is game engines, and I'd still rather use the Quake3 engine or Spring as a starting point for engine work than anything newer.

Re:Did you actually run Windows 95?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes games engines.

By the way I discovered something funny in Windows 10. Open a command prompt window and run the dir /s command, while watching the task manager's performance tab.
This puts a huge load on your Intel CPU!

dir /s is a recursive directory listing, which easily sends thousands lines of text flying on your terminal.
Due to how modern Windows is, and 3D accelerated, this simple directory listing really moves millions/billions pixels. I even timed it, by counting in my head, running dir /s on the home directory on my machine (about 23k files in 7k directories). Run it several times so data is in disk cache.

Default window : 10 seconds. Maximized window : 21 seconds. Tiny window : 4 seconds.
It really is moving billion pixels through the 3D subsystem and shader-enabled GPU. It gets better, I had forgot to check the CPU load. This puts a huge CPU load on conhost.exe and and lesser but still significant load on cmd.exe.

Re:Did you actually run Windows 95?

[Anonymous Coward]

*This puts a huge load on your Intel GPU!

(damn I made that typing mistake)

Windows 95 Hardware

[sjbe]

OK, so let me get this right. Windows-95 ran fine on real hardware with 4MB of memory, and 16MB on a high-end system.

Windows 95 NEVER "ran fine". It was wildly unstable and it ran on those hardware specs because that was the limit of what people had 20 years ago.

And now this guy is delighted to have the same stuff running in 'only 200MB'??

Umm, yeah. Emulating the entire OS and hardware in RAM in just 200MB is pretty impressive actually. It's not running the OS in 4MB - it's emulating the OS, the hardware, the entire hard drive, etc. Apples to oranges you have there.

Re:Windows 95 Hardware

[amicusNYCL]

Windows 95 NEVER "ran fine".

Seriously. Windows 95 is probably the single greatest contributor to people asking "well, did you reboot it?" when something isn't working.

Re:No new & pure web emulators more interestin

[Anonymous Coward]

Say slapped again

Even sadder

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it sad that an OS from 95 offered roughly the same functionality offered today but took much less space. Our tech is degrading.

(And yes, I know about faster internet and better security, that is still not a good enough excuse)

Windows 95 managed to have all the functionality of a 1985 Amiga, while requiring much more hardware capabilities, and providing less in the way of user resources like RAM.

WHY?

[wirehead_rick]

Complete waste of time.

Nothing nostalgic about running an OS that crashed every 15 minutes with the infamous BSD.

Re:WHY?

[Anonymous Coward]

*BSOD

Windoze wishes it was BSD.

old key bindings

[hawk]

> It'll be interesting to see if my fingers remember any shortcuts from the '90s.

I finally seem to have the 1990s MS Word/mac keystrokes out of my fingers (except for the allcaps formatting command . . . )

now if I could do the same for the 70s Wordstar movement commands . . .

hawk

Apps used to be much more compact

[ASCIIxTended]

I remember having a single 1.2mb 5.25" floppy disk with ready-to-run Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, Wordperfect, a virus scanner app and a bunch of games -- with room to spare for documents. Win95 was huge - took like 21 floppies to install.

Whatever, Call Me When I Can Run Bob

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Microsoft Bob was the greatest OS of all time. Period.

It has two independent web browsers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fun thing, I knew my machine has the Flash player plugin (installed by the OEM?) when reviewing the list of past updates (It is short. This is now Windows 1803)
I figured I'd try Edge but it doesn't have Flash. So I tried IE 11 and bingo! it's there. Almost like an easter egg.

If you've got Winblows 10, and like me deleted the Edge icon first thing, you may give IE a try if you want to live the golden age of flash games again.

It's very faithful

[Rick Zeman]

I tried to open a command prompt and it crashed. Just like the old days....

Re:No new & pure web emulators more interestin

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, the quality of technical content vs "hey look this is cool" crap is really putting me off now.
So? Stop browsing here. It's THAT simple.

StarCraft ...

[angel'o'sphere]

Funny,
I was thinking this morning what hooks I have to make to install my old StarCraft again.

Re:No new & pure web emulators more interestin

[Anonymous Coward]

windows 95, now there is an app for that.. appy nappy napp app, apping the app in app with app....

Re:No new & pure web emulators more interestin

[KingBenny]

will it run sid meyers alpha centauri ? for some reason that cant be adapted to linux under wine due to some machine-level code in it or so i was told ... otherwise i'm thinking hard for any reason to download windows 95 lol