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.

Comments

OMG, WHY!?

[wierd_w]

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It is also very much NOT designed with the modern internet in mind, and is no longer maintained for security updates, and has had assloads of malware, both from black hat groups and state intelligence agencies produced to turn it into their bitch.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.

Re:OMG, WHY!?

[wierd_w]

Don't get me wrong. I have done some very silly things with win9x instances, including getting an instance of it to run entirely out of a syslinux memdisk, with drivespace compression turned on.

For the most part however, such silly things had some sliver of a sensible reason d'etre: Quite a few industrial systems run on 9x, even today. (vinyl cutters, CNC laser cutters, waterjet systems, metal detectors, even x-ray systems.) The hardware to keep those old systems running is aging and falling apart (IDE disks especially.) Being able to boot reliably and consistently in a guaranteed clean fashion each and every time with modern replacement parts (SDcard to IDE adapters and pals), makes such experimentation useful to at least a handful of people, making the silliness worthwhile. Learning how to set those legacy deployments up in "Hard to break" configurations is useful, and can be very helpful to the poor souls who have no choice but to work with OSes that ruled the earth in the age of the dinosaurs.

This on the other hand, is just DosBox running on what could possibly be the most inefficiently written platform in existence, with internet connectivity just a stone's throw away.

Considering that dosbox is already multi-platform, AND has a mature x86 emulation core all of its own, **AND** can boot win9x from a disk image natively--- What reason does this even have to exist, except as a hobby project that is not meant to see the light of day?

I really cannot think of one.

Oh God why

[thereddaikon]

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.

Indeed - Why

[SuperKendall]

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.