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

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.

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~~~