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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.

27 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. No new & pure web emulators more interesting by ReneR · · Score: 4, Informative

    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,

  2. Re:No new & pure web emulators more interestin by ReneR · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  3. 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
    1. Re: Sad by that+this+is+not+und · · Score: 2

      '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.

    2. Re:Sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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!

    3. Re:Sad by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.
    4. Re:Sad by slashcross · · Score: 3

      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.

      --
      Slashdot your i and slashcross your t.
    5. Re: Sad by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 4, Funny
      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.

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    6. Re:Sad by bytestorm · · Score: 2

      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.

    7. Re:Sad by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      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.

    8. Re: Sad by jdschulteis · · Score: 2

      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.

    9. Re:Sad by gordguide · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    10. Re:Sad by Scoth · · Score: 2

      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.

  4. ".. 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.

  5. 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*.

  6. 256 colors!!!! by Daralantan · · Score: 2

    Does it let you relive the glory of 256 colors?

  7. Missing the best part by Mordaximus · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  8. Now that's a GREAT emulator by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    So, just like the Win95 Real Thing then.

    1. Re:Now that's a GREAT emulator by lgw · · Score: 2

      ...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.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    2. Re:Now that's a GREAT emulator by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 2

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

  9. Netscape 1.0 by houghi · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
    1. Re:Netscape 1.0 by freeze128 · · Score: 2

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

  10. progress! by sad_ · · Score: 2

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

    --
    On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
  11. Details by DrYak · · Score: 4, Informative

    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~~~

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
  12. Easter Eggs by dohzer · · Score: 2

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

  13. 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.