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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.
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!
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
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.