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Operating Systems Windows Linux Technology

Developer Releases Windows 95 OS as an App For Windows 10, macOS and Linux (betanews.com) 120

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
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.
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Developer Releases Windows 95 OS as an App For Windows 10, macOS and Linux More

Developer Releases Windows 95 OS as an App For Windows 10, macOS and Linux

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  • OMG, WHY!? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by wierd_w ( 1375923 )

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    It is also very much NOT designed with the modern internet in mind, and is no longer maintained for security updates, and has had assloads of malware, both from black hat groups and state intelligence agencies produced to turn it into their bitch.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

    • Re:OMG, WHY!? (Score:5, Funny)

      by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Monday February 11, 2019 @11:26AM (#58104064)

      What about this is a good idea again? I mean, I am practically speechless here.

      If you write 780 characters when you're speechless, I'm wondering how many you would type if you had an opinion about something.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      the answer, as is it is to most of these strange things, simply goes "because it is possible"
      and i have to admit, i for one do not have the skillset to pull this off.
      good idea or not, it is a fine showcase of knowhow

    • Re:OMG, WHY!? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Mordaximus ( 566304 ) on Monday February 11, 2019 @11:27AM (#58104080)

      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.

      • Re:OMG, WHY!? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by wierd_w ( 1375923 ) on Monday February 11, 2019 @12:09PM (#58104344)

        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 I don't disagree.

          Sometimes you only know something is going to be completely useless once you get to the very end. I don't think there's harm in them sharing the work, so long as someone doesn't think it should be used for production.

          I admit I downloaded it, fired it up, instantly hated it the same as I did when it was released and freed up the drive space shortly afterwards.

          • Sometimes you only know something is going to be completely useless once you get to the very end.

            I'm putting new guts in a T2000sxe laptop that they were throwing away at work. It has devoured hours of work, including some custom circuit boards and programming a microcontroller to translate the old keyboard to USB. The end result will be a shitty, huge laptop with a hilariously small screen... I don't care, it's fun.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by ixs ( 36283 )

          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.

          It all started making sense to me when I realized that Felix is one of the Slack Desktop client developers. https://twitter.com/felixriese... [twitter.com] says he is also an electron committer/contributor.

          This should probably never have seen the light of day but if you consider what a disaster the Slack client is... I am not sure Windows 95 is necessarily much worse...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Dry your eyes. Nobody is going to use this as their main OS. Hobbyists will install it once, run it an then forget about it.You a really are a bit of a drama queen.

    • a w 95 os app...cool.
    • Windows 95 has limited technology. This limited technology is a double-edge(d) sword. It limits the user, and the potential attacks against it. If all you want to do is play old games and use it for various other retro-actions, then just leave it off of the internet and enjoy.

    • Indeed - Why (Score:1, Insightful)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 )

      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.

      • It's called a joke Kendall. If I have to explain it, it stops being funny.

        But, since you seem to be serious-- If you take the time t click on my user name, and read my back post history, you will find a decided lack of the thing you are accusing me of.

        This one instance is again-- A joke.

        Thank you, have a nice day.

      • 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.

        Sure, some idiot decides to shut down the government over a morally bankrupt, unsound "political" strategy, and I should ignore him. Right...

        • So shutting down the government over national security is moral bankrupt? Interesting then because that means those on my side of the aisle are the same. The following three Democrats also wanted to build the wall: 2008 Pelosi, 2009 Schumer, 2014 Hillary wanted to build the wall whe on the campaign trail.

          • The fact that you need this explained to you means that it would take too much effort for me to do so.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What about this is a good idea again?

      Same as ever ... because he could.

      Some people build things just for the hell of it, you don't need to approve or understand -- don't like it, don't use it.

      Deal with it. I'm sure the author doesn't care about why you think it's a bad idea.

    • It is also very much NOT designed with the modern internet in mind

      Windows is as Windows does.

    • What about this is a good idea again? I mean, I am practically speechless here.

      I imagine it's easier than trying to get Quake running under Dosbox.

    • 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

    • What about this is a good idea again? I mean, I am practically speechless here.

      You missed both the Doom *and* Wolf3D parts?

      • What about this is a good idea again? I mean, I am practically speechless here.

        You missed both the Doom *and* Wolf3D parts?

        Doom did not run well on Win95 (I don't know anout Wolfenstein). Back then the Doom fans preferred to run it on DOS until it was open sourced and versions were ported to XP and Linux. Doom for Win95 was just a publicity stunt paid for by Gates.

    • I thought Gary Bernhardt's The Birth & Death of JavaScript [destroyallsoftware.com] talk was supposed to satire not a documentary! =P

    • Legacy financial applications, medical records, and very old games. I have, myself, encountered the difficulties of recovering old data from old media with old software that could easily justify having an effective emulator to recover that data.

  • Imagine if the developer focused his talent on something worth while. Like coding for an open source project.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by sobachatina ( 635055 )

      This was apparently worthwhile to them.

      Or do you mean they should work on a project worthwhile to someone else?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jm007 ( 746228 )
        lol, no frills, straight to the point

      • Or do you mean they should work on a project worthwhile to someone else?

        Should? No. They didn't say anything about should. They said "imagine if". And I'm right there with them, imagining it. This project is senseless. At the end, it will be good only for bragging rights, but who wants to brag about doing something useless?

        • definition of "should":
          "used to indicate obligation, duty, or correctness, typically when criticizing someone's actions."

          The OP was definitely criticizing and was obviously indicating a "more correct" course of action. Therefore- the word "should" was entirely appropriate to describe that comment.

          Ironically, your comment starts by saying that the word "should" was inappropriate- but then you proceed to describe exactly why you agree that they should do something else.
          We get it. You think it's a waste of tim

      • Well, every programmer probably works on fun projects on the side. Most of them don't submit it to Slashdot hoping to be validated. There should be a "News For Nerds" angle here, not just a "what are you working on this week?" chat over dinner.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Njovich ( 553857 )

      Imagine if you yourself focused your talent on something worthwhile instead of posting on Slashdot. Like feeding children in Africa.

    • Or if the developer used a real programming language...

  • It's like QEmu but SLOOOOWER. (Score:3)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Monday February 11, 2019 @11:39AM (#58104162)

    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.

  • Oh God why (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thereddaikon ( 5795246 ) on Monday February 11, 2019 @11:41AM (#58104166)
    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.

    • Electron is the embodiment of every joke about programmers being lazy ever made.

      So it's a web site where you submit some vague requirements and they send you back the code later in the afternoon?

    • Re:Oh God why (Score:5, Funny)

      by GuB-42 ( 2483988 ) on Monday February 11, 2019 @05:16PM (#58106546)

      Electron is an excellent choice.
      The recommended specs for Windows 95 are a 486 CPU, 8MB of RAM. Thanks to Electron, we can get close to that level of performance with our modern high end PCs.

    • In a cross-platform world where you need to write software to run on Windows, Mac, iOS, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and whatever comes along next, you need hardware and device abstraction. Coding right to the metal is great if that meets the business need at hand, but, increasingly, and for more and more use cases, it does not.
      • You can use portable platforms without developing your entire application inside a freaking web browser. That isn't just another layer of abstraction, its insanity. If you want portability use python or java.
        • I do sometimes, but no guarantee either will be available in my target environment, or the right versions, classpaths, Python versions, environment variables, and such. At a minimum I'd have to install/configure whatever is missing, without damaging anything else on the target system. But anything from the tiniest compute stick to old Windows XP boxes up to Crays and mainframes and Beowulf clusters of unusual size will probably have a Web browser readily available. The Web has become the default front
          • Didn't Chromium drop Windows XP support a few months back? How do you expect that to work exactly? I doubt you are developing applications for Windows XP or compute clusters though. Lets be honest your target environment for an end user is either Android, iOS, Windows 7-10, MacOS and maybe Linux. That's it. Python is actually pretty good about moving between those major environments. But to counter your argument that web frameworks are the most portable I will say this; the web is too mutable for a stabl

  • It's all fun and games... (Score:3)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Monday February 11, 2019 @11:53AM (#58104242) Homepage
    ....until somebody ports EMACS to it.
  • could swear I saw something this 6 month if not even as long as a year ago, ..?

  • I'll still stick to Linux, though.

  • In Javascript? (Score:3)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday February 11, 2019 @01:06PM (#58104690)

    Well, at least we won't have to worry about it running too fast to play the games.

  • 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 c

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dryeo ( 100693 )

      I just tried with NS 4.61, nothing but broken pipe messages. Found NS 2.02, same thing except the popup said network error, broken pipe.

  • I 3 Win95 (Score:3)

    by sootman ( 158191 ) on Monday February 11, 2019 @01:52PM (#58105030) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Talking of happy days. I started my programming career in IBM OS/2. It is such a great system I designed my home alarm system around it. It started controlling my home in 1995, mostly with automating lights. Then with the door bells, both front and back, then with monitoring doors and windows opening, then outdoor and indoor temperatures for the HVAC system and the attic fan when the temperature rises above 15 degrees in the attic when the low temperature outside is 70 degrees or more and the sun is shining

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by _merlin ( 160982 )

      Haha back in the day, Win95 was derided as bloated, slow, and unresponsive. It was funny but responsiveness seemed to stay the same as computers got faster and software got correspondingly more bloated. Time to launch the current version of MS Word for Windows was roughly the same from a '386 with Windows 3.1 up to a Pentium II with Windows 98.

  • Whats next? ASCII Pr0n app for IOS?
    Have we not evolved?
  • 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/ [github.com]. They've got Windows 1.01, Windows 95 and Linux 3 demos that run right in your browser.
  • 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.

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