
Windows98 Running in the Browser - tectonic
https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98
======
MrBuddyCasino
Back when the system settings could be reached with less clicks, were
organised in a logical way and didn't use most of the screen as white-space.

~~~
nolok
You mean before windows tried to be designed as a a tablet OS while being on
desktop for 8.0, failed on both as easily predicted, and then refused to admit
the mistake ever since beside the one mandatory change of adding a normal
start button / menu back?

That full screen start view was one hell of an abomination....

~~~
blauditore
To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view,
agnostic of history. People were just not used to a full-screen, search-
focused start menu. A similar thing happened with Vista, people were
overwhelmed with the wildly different UI. The next version was then a slightly
milder version of it, and at the same time people had gotten used to it a bit,
so most were happy with Windows 7 and are now happy with Windows 10.

It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it
comes to those things.

~~~
MisterTea
> To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view,
> agnostic of history.

Perhaps in a vacuum it might work. But this is the real world were hypothesis
are just that.

> A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly
> different UI

No. People were apparently overwhelmed by system instability and resource
hogging (mainly hard drive grinding). I don't remember people complaining
about the UI's usability. Though there were UI complaints which were mostly
echos of the same complaints leveled at the glossy "Teletubby" XP theme.

> It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it
> comes to those things.

Interesting? It's human nature. We develop habits and routines which take time
to memorize and get right. It's work which we personally invested. I'm sure
you have routines that if changed by an external force without choice would be
upsetting to you.

~~~
buran77
> and resource hogging

Memory usage used to be a major complaint (possibly the biggest) even if it
was made clear repeatedly that the OS was simply keeping more stuff in RAM
instead of dumping it to disk specifically to improve performance. A mechanism
that stuck to these days. That memory isn't marked that obviously in the Task
Manager now, and memory is is no longer such a luxury so people don't complain
anymore. But on my 16GB machine I have 4.1GB in use clearly marked on the
graph, and another 7.5GB cached that is not at all made to jump at people.
People want the added goodies and expect absolutely no impact on anything
else.

When XP was launched we heard the same grumbles. XP was bloated, had higher
resource usage than 98/2000, less stable than 2000, not compatible with a lot
of hardware, weird GUI. By SP3 people were loving it and by the time Win 7
arrived nobody wanted to let go of XP. Win 7 was bloated, had higher resource
usage than XP, less stable than XP, not compatible with a lot of hardware,
weird GUI. By SP2 people were loving it and by the time Win 10 came along
nobody wanted to let go of Win 7. And no, it's not an issue of OS quality
going down. Like you said, people just get used to stuff and can't take change
and when you combine it with the lack of understanding you get all kinds
complaints.

Reminds me of an anecdote about a certain car made for the low end market,
targeting a segment of owners of 20+ year old clunkers. Everyone would buy it
and complain that the fuel consumption was _huge_. Strangely enough this was a
modern engine, certainly more efficient than the old ones it was replacing.
The problem? The fancy computer was showing instantaneous fuel consumption.
When accelerating? 25 liters/100Km. Outrageous! The company just hid the
instantaneous counter and left only the very reasonable average. Problem
solved. Then there were the "I can't feel the road with this power steering"
complaints which worked themselves out, although to this day there are people
who swear the old cars were better (they were most definitely not).

Between lack of knowledge, nostalgia goggles, unreasonable expectations ("all
of it, for free"), and a few more things these popular opinions of tech of the
past aren't all that useful. It says a lot about the commercial success of a
product, not its actual qualities.

~~~
Klinky
I am pretty sure Windows 7 was pretty highly praised upon its release and
considered vastly superior to Vista, and at least on par with XP as far as
usability.

~~~
buran77
Vista was a blip on the radar and nobody ever really used it as a reference
point for anything other than ridicule. XP was running strong even in 2014
when it went out of support so it makes sense this was the bar to pass for Win
7. And the vast majority of users jumped from XP to 7 as the numbers confirm.

In 2009 when Windows 7 was launched, Vista's market share (all desktop OSes)
reached the all time peak of 18%. At the same time the (then) 8 year old
Windows XP had 72%.

------
lxe
Plugging Fabrice Bellard's
[https://bellard.org/jslinux/](https://bellard.org/jslinux/) where you can run
linux and windows on a hand crafted js x86 emulator.

~~~
dleslie
Of course it was Bellard. Of course.

~~~
giantDinosaur
The challenge is to find something he made that _isn 't_ in some way
impressive.

~~~
alvarelle
The graphical design of his website?

~~~
numlock86
There is no design so there is nothing to judge about.

~~~
saagarjha
We can judge him for his design, which is to consciously choose to not focus
on design :)

------
csomar
Here is something that I stumbled upon that I think was a big loss: HTML Help
[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help)]

It's unfortunate that Microsoft didn't work toward making it an open source
standard for documentation. We'd have avoided every other documentation having
it's own format, style, etc... Plus you get the whole documentation in a
single file, not worrying about broken stuff, missing images, broken links,
etc...

~~~
newsbinator
I remember when you could bypass the login prompt and open a web browsing
session by going to HTML Help. If I recall correctly you could run executables
from the resulting browser's address bar too.

~~~
barbegal
I think that was still a bug in Windows XP.

~~~
pix64
With Windows 10 you can boot from a DVD/USB and replace system files in the
Windows directory related to the accessibility options. The accessibility
options are available at the login screen and are ran with admin privileges.
Then you simply click the button to start the accessibility options and bam
you've changed the administrator password.

------
rightbyte
It's funny how I find Win98 more user friendly and logical than Win10. Just
look at the start menu where thing are sorted in folders. No ads optimizations
anywhere. Just an annoying shortcut on the desktop for MS Internet.

Is it possible to make a program like the sheep.exe nowadays? It is awesome.

~~~
1ko
Gnome 2 was Windows 95 UI, refined, cleaned of all bloat and with a modern
look (for his time). All installed apps were automatically stored is the right
sub-menu in the Application button. It was really neat to use.

~~~
coldpie
XFCE basically still is that. No "reinventing the desktop experience" junk,
just a rock-solid desktop with all the features you expect.

~~~
ciupicri
All features except running on Wayland.

------
izietto
To me, still the best UI/UX OS experience. That menu organization is just
perfect. Everything is crystal clear about what is selected or not. No idea
why the OS moved from this layout.

~~~
znpy
yes. in my opinion though, windows 2000 was the pinnacle.

it had the user experience of windows 98 but was also a lot more stable.

~~~
szatkus
Non-NT Windows didn't support memory protection. That's the main reason why it
was much more stable. Programming on Windows 98 was a nightmare. If you, for
example, went too far with your `i++` you could've crashed the system.

~~~
andrewshadura
That's not actually true. It was far more nuanced than this.

------
_trampeltier
Now you have a VM in a browser on a cellphone. And my cellphone still have
sometimes problems on so many pages because they are so bloated. A full OS
does load faster then so many website ..

------
lewiscollard
Awww, "My Briefcase"! I had totally forgotten that was a thing :) What a nice
little nostalgia trip.

~~~
lostgame
Omigosh, I really miss the heck out of when Windows had charm, and personality
like this.

Stuff like Hover! - getting that Weezer music video with the Happy Days set on
the Win 95 media edition or whatever...such cool little things that displayed
a sense of ‘fun’ about very business-centric software.

~~~
netsharc
My Pentium 100 could play this 320x240 video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc)
fullscreen with no choppiness. I had forgotten about this video until I saw it
last year...

But Windows had skeumorphisms, even nowadays the screen with everything
minimised is called "the desk[ ]top".

But I guess briefcases and recycle bins made things relatable...

------
FillardMillmore
Wow, what a flashback! This was the OS I actually grew up with. I remember
being 3 or 4 years old and playing Carnivores 2 on my Dad's Windows 98 PC.
Even the slowness and unresponsiveness is there, just like I remember!
Yeah...this was the golden age. So much hope and so much optimism for what
could be in regards to technology and what it would allow for the general
population. I still think we're not there, but we can get there still,
perhaps.

~~~
hnlmorg
> _this was the golden age. So much hope and so much optimism for what could
> be_

Funny that because I grew up in the 80s and for me the golden age was 10 to 15
years earlier and I saw Windows 98 as the decline.

There was so much variety and experimentation in the 80s, and so much
excitement too when GUIs first started appearing on home computers. There was
also much more diversity in the computing landscape with different hardware
architectures and operating systems. In fact back then DOS machines were some
of the least interesting hardware and early Windows (pre 3.x) was just
terrible compared to what Acorn, Atari, Amiga and Apple were doing. Then came
the mid-90s and everything had converged into x86 running Windows. I remember
at the time feeling rather let down by just how boring and crummy desktop
computing had become considering all the interesting things that preceded it.
Things picked up again once I discovered BeOS and Linux -- I guess even in the
90s I didn't like Microsoft Windows and to be honest little has changed over
the years.

That's just my opinion though. The "golden age" is a very subjective thing
that I suspect is largely driven by the age of the observer.

~~~
saagarjha
I grew up using Windows XP/Vista and browsing the early days of the
interactive web, mostly based on Flash. For me of course that was the golden
age, and now we’re stuck with huge walled gardens and invasive adtech…iPhone
had come out and it was amazing watching the mobile market rapidly advance. I
remember seriously suggesting Windows Phone to my parents…Google Docs totally
upended how we did assignments in late elementary school.

~~~
FillardMillmore
I don't think Google Docs was a thing until I was in high school. Still, don't
think my schools adopted it quickly. I do have many fond memories of flash
games too (and of course, viruses I inadvertently introduced to my parents'
computers).

Back when I was learning computers in elementary school, we were taugh to use
Yahoo! as our search engine and most of our 'computer' assignments for the day
involved drawing butterflies in Microsoft Paint or seeing how many words we
could type per minute.

------
btashton
First think I had to do was see if Active Desktop worked... And yes it does.
"View My Active Desktop as a web page", I guess Windows 98 was just ahead of
its time.

~~~
mercer
Set the desktop background as this site for some winception!

------
jokoon
Does anybody have a reasonable explanation why windows 10 requires a SSD and
so much ram?

I wish a kernel engineer could give a good answer to that question.

One side of the answer could be that the software that is bigger, but honestly
that doesn't explain everything.

I wish somebody could confirm Wirth's law is real and that there are valid
example of it.

~~~
muazzam
The same reason Facebook loads multiple MBs of JavaScript code for something
that could have been not more than 1 MB. One can't help but wonder about
nefarious purposes: either collecting user data or abusing the computing
resources. For companies that tend to hire the best and the brightest, the
'software bloat' theory is not compelling.

Curiously, major Linux distributions have also gotten significantly slower
compared to early 2000s versions.

I wonder, for a thought experiment, what if companies stopped development on
software when it reaches certain stage of maturity, say Windows 2000,
providing only necessary security updates or optional visual changes?

~~~
rightbyte
I was very reluctant switching from win xp to win 7. Unless the 64bit era
would have forced me I rather would have stayed put.

New software is really not adding much to the table after some point of
completion since the software companies seems to mostly add pet feutures and
user hostile fads be it star menu, complete gui changes, 'enterprise' admin
lookout or ads and tracking.

E.g. Facebooks 1000s of developers seem to add a net of antifeutures to their
site. On Netflix you can't even disable autoplay.

It is the same really for software moving to remote mainframes. The companies
rather hide and burry the old desktop versions deep.

------
keyle
Impressive! But loading Google for kicks, in IE, sort of killed it.

Definitely can feel the nostalgia.

I remember the first time I decided to leave Windows 95 run overnight, the
next morning, moving the mouse would send the harddrive playhead flying like
crazy... You know the old "SHRrrrrt Shrrrt..."

It had such a memory leak overnight that moving the mouse was causing the swap
to kick in non-stop!

~~~
WantonQuantum
Interesting. In 1997 I had a thinkpad running Windows 95 and I went weeks
between reboots. It was rock solid.

~~~
toast0
Windows 95/98 stability really depended on the quality of your hardware,
drivers, and software. If things intracted poorly, it was easy to get a system
that needed a reboot every few hours to stay responsive.

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
Agreed. Drivers were a big one. As I remember, they had unfettered access to
everything... so they could consume all ram or cpu or read any part of memory.
Powerful and scary.

~~~
hyperman1
In win95, everything had access to everything if it wanted. E.g. DLLs were
mapped in a shared memory segment that was shared between all applications.
Lots of 16 bit code was still running, and this did IPC basically by messing
in some other program's memory. Backward compatibilitty required very thin
walls between processes.

DOS TSR programs started before windows were still running. I had one that
popped up a calculator in dos text mode, and if you pushed its hotkey in
win95, it switched win95 back to text mode, paused win95, did its thing, then
popped back in win95.

Only the very basics of protected mode and virtual memory where there, and a
well-behaving program had a reasonable chance of staying in its own sandbox.
But only because it wanted to. Seen from the CPU, you could argue EMM386 was
more the actual OS than win95/win98.

None of this is meant to be negative. It was a solid step up from windows 3.x,
and yet quite usable with 4MB RAM of which the first 1MB wanted a very
different treatment.

------
danfritz
Ha the beauty of calling defrag.exe and hoping your pc would run faster after
it. So relaxing to see blue block move around (with the occasional horror of a
red block indicating an error)

------
hyko
Shame we're limited to 16 colors...miss those title bar gradients :D

Was this the pinnacle of UI design, or is nostalgia clouding our judgment?

~~~
ptx
I think the pinnacle must have been before the title bar gradients were added.
They always annoyed me: is the title bar any less of a title bar towards the
right? No? Then why does it fade out?

~~~
derefr
The color is a background for the text. It fades out because the bar stops
being about showing the title text, and starts being about showing window
controls, that exist as buttons with their own backgrounds and borders.

Sort of like how desktop icons have text with a blur-extruded drop-shadow. It
fades out at the point where text is no longer shown.

~~~
ptx
The title is shown in the entire title bar (e.g. long titles for web pages)
all the way until it reaches the buttons, which as you say have their own
border, so there is no gradual change in its character. It's 100% draggable
and 100% showing text all the way, so the form (showing gradual change) is at
odds with the function (sharp distinction between title and buttons).

------
vishwajeetv
What interests me is the core interactions with Windows systems remain mostly
the same, unchanged, in the span of last 20 years!

~~~
ToFab123
Isn't the same true for osx and linux?

~~~
phendrenad2
> osx

Between architecture changes (PowerPC to x86 to x86-64 and next up ARM), and
compiler changes (I doubt Objective-C code written for OS X 1.0 will compile
on the latest XCode), breaking API changes, security changes, and even
deprecating standards (can't use latest OpenGL, you gotta use Metal)... not
really.

~~~
saagarjha
Depends on how complicated it was. I can assure you that your simple GUI still
mostly works as those classes came from NeXT and aren’t going anywhere soon.

------
kdamica
I immediately played Freecell, which I spent way too many hours playing as a
kid.

------
hestefisk
Ping localhost works as well. Now to see if you can kill the machine by
causing a ICMP packet buffer overflow.

------
aronpye
Has it crashed for anyone yet? I tried using Windows Update and it hung, it’s
Windows 98 alright.

~~~
zuppy
you can crash it with the /con/con commad too

edit: for the ones who haven't lived the windows 95-98 era:
[https://coderanch.com/t/131585/engineering/Folder-con-
Window...](https://coderanch.com/t/131585/engineering/Folder-con-Windows-
invalid#639965)

------
hestefisk
This is brilliant. Even the goold old Windows --> Run ... -> CON/CON bug seems
to work.

------
thom
For even more fractal nostalgia, please be aware that in those days you could
still run 'progman.exe' if you so desired.

Sadly this install doesn't include QBasic which was also still available on
these DOS based Windows versions.

------
tectonic
See also: [https://github.com/jsdf/pce](https://github.com/jsdf/pce)

------
thanato0s
I won winmine on win98 in a browser.

My 14 years old me would have never believed me.

That's why I made a screenshot.

------
Commodore_64
Hell yeah! Now I can play jazz jackrabbit in firefox!

~~~
umvi
I wanted to play Chip's Challenge, but it's too slow on my Chromebook

------
backzerman
omg finally a reasonable minesweeper emulator

~~~
throwaway888abc
:) Check the javascript replica

[https://codepen.io/joelbyrd/pen/hdHKF](https://codepen.io/joelbyrd/pen/hdHKF)

~~~
kyberias
Bad imitation. Doesn't support the all-important right-mouse+left-mouse click
combination.

~~~
steerablesafe
Check out minesweeper X, it was (is?) used by the competitive minesweeper
scene (yes, it was a thing).

[http://www.minesweeper.info/downloads/MinesweeperX.html](http://www.minesweeper.info/downloads/MinesweeperX.html)

------
fredley
I can _hear_ the sound when the hourglass appears. You know the one I mean (if
you're old enough).

------
max_
Hypothetical question: If you where a program running in the VM how would you
know if you are in one?

~~~
benbristow
There's ways. Detecting whether tools like VMWare/Virtualbox are installed,
whether certain drivers are installed, checking the hardware listings etc.
etc.

Malware is quite a good study subject about this question. There's a lot of
malware that won't run if it's in a virtual machine to avoid researchers from
testing it inside one.

~~~
brittspace
Do you have a reference that is runnable in this emulator? (Genuinely
curious.)

~~~
Retr0spectrum
[https://github.com/LordNoteworthy/al-khaser#anti-
virtualizat...](https://github.com/LordNoteworthy/al-khaser#anti-
virtualization--full-system-emulation)

[https://github.com/AlicanAkyol/sems](https://github.com/AlicanAkyol/sems)

(dunno if these would build/run on win98 though)

------
eeereerews
Firefox/Linux: the cursor constantly tracks to the left. You have to push the
mouse to the right to keep it still.

Works in Chromium though.

~~~
0xffff2
Firefox 77.0.1/Ubuntu 18.04: No mouse drift for me.

------
timvdalen
Wow, I can't believe how smooth that is.

I've got to say, the icon for .txt files brought on some very specific hit of
nostalgia.

------
b3lvedere
Nice. Even the old /con/con bug still works :) -edit- sorry about that, was
already mentioned previously :)

------
annoyingnoob
Tried to visit yahoo.com and IE crashed.

~~~
sevencolors
I think because this is a stock install and needs a network connection setup
first. Mine "crashes" too but then another window loads to setup MSN

Good times!

------
dariosalvi78
Would myself in 2000 believe that I would be running Windows 98 in a mobile
phone, emulated in a browser?

~~~
brittspace
Given that 2000 was the time of Windows CE on the Compaq iPAQ H3100 [1] ...
no, probably not :)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ)

------
nabaraz
I tried unsuccessfully to load Windows98 (via same link) in the Internet
Explorer. Inception!

------
classified
Won't that provoke a DMCA takedown request and a subsequent lawsuit from
Microsoft?

~~~
notriddle
Maybe a DMCA takedown notice...

But a lawsuit? Why would Microsoft care enough to launch a lawsuit?

------
dirtyid
Kind of miss how... unified the design language was back then. I've resorted
to making custom icons for my taskbar because ever app suit has their own
clashing identity. That's after inconsistencies in Win10 intself.

------
EvanAnderson
Boots the QNX demo disk[1]. Pretty cool! Sadly, it does not detect the
emulated PCI NE2000 NIC.

[1]
[http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html)

------
TheSpiceIsLife
The Hindu’s got it wrong...

It’s JavaScript libraries all the way down.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down)

------
rory_h_r
Windows98 with the best version of Solitaire. Those were the days.

------
renewiltord
This is beautiful and pure nostalgia fever.

------
thamer
How to get a BSOD:

1\. Open Start Menu

2\. Click "Run"

3\. Type: con\con and press enter

------
reddotX
Start -> Run -> aux/aux

------
sirusdas
i am still unable to understand it, do you mean you are mounting the system in
browser? how do you make sense of the bin and iso file in node and how exactly
an os can run using V8 engine?

------
muterad_murilax
For the love of God, please fix the title already! (Missing a space.)

------
turdnagel
IE is crashing for me whenever I try to load any site.

------
beamatronic
Is it public domain now?

~~~
orionblastar
No, but it is no longer supported by Microsoft so it is abandonware. It is
still closed source and piracy to copy without permission but Microsoft does
not care about it because it is too old to sue over.

~~~
chungy
They've been known to send C&Ds to various sites that host old versions like
this.

"no longer supported" is a flimsy argument for abandonware anyway. by that
reasoning, Windows 7 is abandonware and it still runs basically every Windows
program ever.

~~~
lostgame
I think that kind of boils down to the ‘spirit of the law’ kinda thing.

Windows 98, conversely; _cannot_ run modern software, and the majority of
software in use for the last decade - it is only going to be installed as an
experiment by geeks like us, for the most part.

~~~
quickthrower2
Arguably anything using Windows 98 is satire. :-)

~~~
mschuster91
For what it's worth, a Berlin court used Windows 95 (!) until Fall 2019, and I
wish I were joking here. [https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/experten-warnten-
schon-20...](https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/experten-warnten-
schon-2017-it-katastrophe-am-berliner-kammergericht-kam-mit-
ansage/25163810.html)

------
noisy_boy
I like the offline-Dropbox aka My Briefcase. God I hated that app for no good
reason.

------
jose-cl
sheep.exe <3

~~~
Nursie
Might be of interest then - [https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/p/esheep-64bit/9mx2v0tqt6rm?...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/p/esheep-64bit/9mx2v0tqt6rm?activetab=pivot:overviewtab)

eSheep 64!

(I haven't tried it)

------
subhashp
Amazing!

------
mongojunction
This is really amazing and takes me back.

Very funny seeing it on such a small format in the top right corner.

Makes me think a "Windows 98" PWA on mobile would be super funny.

Unfortunately the windows sound wave file doesn't make any sound in the
browser. I guess this is because a Soundcard or Speaker is not emulated.

