Slashdot Mirror
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.
If you write 780 characters when you're speechless, I'm wondering how many you would type if you had an opinion about something.
#DeleteFacebook
I don't think anyone implied it's a good idea. Just because is reason enough and hats off to those involved for their efforts. Reminds me of the good ol' days of trying to run Linux on anything just because.
Verbose exhortations bordering on small novels in length.
Why do you ask? :P
If you write 780 characters when you're speechless, I'm wondering how many you would type if you had an opinion about something.
640 characters should be enough for everyone.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
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.