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

Posted by BeauHD on from the made-for-nostalgics dept.

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.

5 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Sad by lucasnate1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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)

    --
    Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
  2. ".. only 200MB" by scsirob · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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'??

    --
    To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
    1. Re:".. only 200MB" by Parker+Lewis · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  3. Details by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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*.

  4. Re:No new & pure web emulators more interestin by ledow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.