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Developer Releases Windows 95 OS as an App For Windows 10, macOS and Linux (betanews.com)
Mark Wycislik-Wilson, writing for BetaNews: Last year, developer Felix Rieseberg released Windows 95 as an Electron app to let 90s computer users relive their younger years. Now he's back with a second version of the Windows 95 app, and it's even better than ever -- gaming classics such as Doom and Wolfenstein3D are now included, for starters! Based on the Electron framework, Windows 95 2.0 is written in JavaScript, and is essentially a 500MB standalone virtual machine. The original release was lacking in a number of areas -- such as no sound or internet access. This second release is described as a "big update" and includes a web browser in the form of Netscape Navigator 2.0.
First, we have an OS that bounces back and forth between real and protected mode faster than Trump pounds out nonsense statements on Twitter.
It is also very much NOT designed with the modern internet in mind, and is no longer maintained for security updates, and has had assloads of malware, both from black hat groups and state intelligence agencies produced to turn it into their bitch.
And we are running it on the ELECTRON platform, which is a web browser hosted virtual machine environment... So we are basically putting the above horror show in direct contact with the internet...
AND incorporating content that might not be legally licensed to be bundled or distributed in this fashion.
What about this is a good idea again? I mean, I am practically speechless here.
does it come with monkey virus? I remember that was one badass disk destroying virus.. ;)
-db
...as soon as they can re-make Windows 7 so I don't need to go to Windows 10, that'd be grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat. Thanks.
This is nothing more then a IBM compatible emulator with a Win95 hard drive image pre-packaged in.
Why is this even a news story?
This will get taken down fast from Github for copyright.
Imagine if the developer focused his talent on something worth while. Like coding for an open source project.
Seriously, what are they thinking? There are so many good x86 emulator out there and they choose to make one in Javascript only to package it to run on desktops? That's a turducken of inefficiency and stupidity.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Electron is the embodiment of every joke about programmers being lazy ever made. It is an abomination. It and similar frameworks like CEF are the opposite of the direction we should be going in. It used to be that programmers actually knew how their hardware worked. It used to be they knew how their code interacted with a system. Now they have no idea and to save their ignorance just throw extra layers of abstraction at it until their code only has to interact with some weird Fischer Price idea of what a computer looks like. Want to go a step further? Develop your electron apps with NPM. Because being dependent on the cloud for your dependencies is such a great idea. I'm not saying everyone should only develop in assembly or even C. But these super high level languages that run in VMs are being horribly abused. They are inefficient, insecure and often the lazy ignorant assholes who make them cant even be bothered to write their JS clean. I would be more lenient if they tried to write smart code in a stupid framework but its stupidity all the way down. With great power comes great responsibility. The dev community has shown they can exercise the wisdom of a five year old who found daddy's gun. I'm hoping some spectre level exploit comes to light that ruins the whole concept so we can go back to writing software the right way.
is relished by the wisest men.
Many real developers do stupid, inane stuff all the time. His crime here, it seems, is that his nonsense is just good enough to release to a wider audience.
faster than Trump pounds out nonsense statements on Twitter.
You know what's funny? I support Trump, yet never bring him up unless it's directly pertinent to the topic at hand.
Yet people that hate him seem to want to talk about him all the time. If I have someone I really dislike, my goal in life is that I think about them zero. In fact my general goal in life is to think about politicians zero.
If nothing else for your own health forget about Trump.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
....until somebody ports EMACS to it.
technology is not a meritocracy, sometimes things with less merit win. deal with it.
Lets put the Science back into Computer Science.
A good portion of Science is doing things that may not necessarily make a good product, but advancements and progress happen from learning from the action of doing this.
I have written hundreds of programs, that I play with, end delete, including small OS's, different data collection and storage methods, opening up a new language and see what I can do with it. Nothing that can become a product to sell, as there are already built applications which do the same job, or it just isn't fully baked.
But what that does is keep my mind sharp, and agile to the changing environment. We are going to dump this .NET stuff and switch to NodeJS. Thats fine, because I have played with NodeJS and have a good idea on what I am doing. We stopped dealing with SOAP and going towards Restful Web Services, that is good too, as I was already experimenting with them and know how to handle them.
This guy went a little further, and basically made a product out of it, which I expect he had learned a lot of it, and given an odd task he would probably be able to jump onto it.
Have we as Capitalist Americans become so jaded on the Economy that learning for the sense of learning is a foreign concepts. Are all our home improvements designed to increase the value of our home, not something we would like to have ourselves. Do all our hobbies need to have a measurable benefit to our lives?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I won't be satisfied until I see an infinite loop involving DOS/Windows, VAX, asm.js, EMACS, a Texas Instruments calculator, a Minecraft CPU, and a (simulated) fully mechanical computer.
Don't say "infinite is impossible". Haskell has no problem with infinite data structures thanks to lazy evaluation. It only evaluates what it needs to get the result. So if you're smart, then once you end up at a 1px display, you can just evaluate what it takes to get that pixel to have the correct color, and never evaluate the nested VMs. Ditto for other I/O interfaces. :))
could swear I saw something this 6 month if not even as long as a year ago, ..?
I'll still stick to Linux, though.
blessed are the dead who dyed in the Lorde
Different AC here.
When someone tells me why I think what I think, I classify that person as a moron. You just qualified.
Well, at least we won't have to worry about it running too fast to play the games.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A trip down memory lane is fun and all; but the WWW in 2019 is all but completely cut off from older browsers. Basically anything that can't speak SSL3.0 won't connect to any ssl/tls servers; those which do speak ssl 3.0 still can't connect to much because most things need tls now. Even sites that would render (potentially) mostly live on servers that are now https only or just send a redirect to https for any http requests.
Essentially without a proxy server that can speak the down level protocol to the client while speaking newer protocols to the sever and NOT using CONNECT; its dead. TL:DR I don't think you can even visit slashdot.org with Netscape 2.0 without additional software to facilitate that.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
You know what's a really nice, responsive, fast OS? A clean install of Win95 on a Pentium 100 with 32 MB RAM. Add a few basic apps and it's still fine. Sadly, it gets worse over time, after a few months and after installing many apps. But a fresh install felt better than XP on a 1 GHz PIII. But my personal favorite for power, features, and stability was Windows 2000. All the good stuff from Win95/98, the stability of NT, and none of the gunk of XP. I used that for as long as it was viable. (Which is to say, about 5 years longer than anyone else did.)
I had Win95 on a Compaq 3060 and it was unusually stable for Windows. I used a batch file to log boots and uptime was typically a month or more. It was on 24/7 and I just darkened the screen when not in use.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Please, do XP, to provide a path for the few remaining games and apps we need from Windows.
Linux is easily capable of handling everything else.
Take down notice incoming in 3... 2...
This could be great for owners of old 1990s cars whose DVD-based service manuals require Windows 95 or Windows NT.
I can run Windows 95 in VirtualBox with a network stack and Netscape will actually work
or VMWare workstation
or a VM in HyperV
or a VM in Xenserver
Am I missing the point here ?
My understanding from skimming through the readme in the GitHub repo is that what the guy did is basically create a VM that can run Windows 95. Still impressive, but he didn't write a whole new Windows emulator from the ground like the Wine and ReactOS. So this is more like somebody running Virtualbox or QEMU in a browser, with some fun programs thrown in for convenience, so you don't have to "pirate" them individually.
Whats next? ASCII Pr0n app for IOS?
Have we not evolved?
You're not even him! Nobody told you anything!
He literally said that he (presumably willfully) ignores every person('s every statement) he doesn't like!
You Ameritards are amazing in how retarded you are. The Dunning-Kruger effect doesn't even suffice to describe it anymore!
Boy are we all, the entire world, happy to see your degenerated society fall flat on its face and break its neck inside your own giant turd. You can stay as loud and obnoxious and ignorant and delusional and psychopathic as you want... Nobody cares anymore. We just watch the trainwreck unfold. With popcorn. In its full glory. ^^
This electron "app" uses v86 which is an x86 emulator inside the V8 javascript engine (which does 99% of the "work" here). If you want to see live demos, check out https://github.com/copy/v86/. They've got Windows 1.01, Windows 95 and Linux 3 demos that run right in your browser.
The original release was lacking in a number of areas -- such as no sound or internet access.
Amen! A million times AMEN!
so what's the point? Windows 95 works almost perfectly under dosbox, without all the caveats of Riseberg's solution. and Windows 95 using a 500MB virtual machine? that's just silly.
Hold muh nuts.