
Windows93 - piqufoh
https://www.windows93.net/
======
hluska
My four year old doesn’t believe that computers ever looked or loaded like
this. Hacker News is ‘farty’ and ‘telling stories’ today.

Edit - The four year old doesn’t believe that I went to school. This is going
to be quite the ride to daycare...

~~~
asveikau
It didn't look like this. Especially not in 1993. They are mixing a bunch of
metaphors from different time periods. Mostly late 90s but nothing ever
animated like this either.

~~~
anticensor
Windows 93 is what became Windows 95.

~~~
roelschroeven
Nah, I don't think so, Windows 95 was codenamed Chicago before it was
released. I can't remember ever having seen the name "Windows 93" mentioned in
that time.

~~~
anticensor
See The Old New Thing, by Raymond Chen:
[https://books.google.com.tr/books?id=wYrCitbs5PQC](https://books.google.com.tr/books?id=wYrCitbs5PQC)
, where he says "Windows 95 was originally Windows 93, after all."

~~~
roelschroeven
You're right, apparently, and I was wrong. Wikipedia says so too:

> So the development of Windows "Chicago" was started and, as it was planned
> for a late 1993 release, became known as Windows 93 which was also known as
> Windows 4.0.

------
syx
This site is truly amazing, it's really inspiring to see how some people can
get so creative using the old Desktop GUI metaphor. I'm personally curating a
list [1] of all these websites and webapps that look like vintage desktop UIs.

[1] [https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-gui-
websites](https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-gui-websites)

~~~
megadrive
Apologies I'm not familiar with request process on your github. Your list is
great, I have some of those already saved as bookmarks. But here is another
good one, Amiga workbench;
[http://www.chiptune.com/](http://www.chiptune.com/)

~~~
syx
Thanks so much for this site, it's really well crafted! For your information
you can simply modify the file README.md and then open a pull request for your
submission.

------
4cao
No matter how hard I try, can't find a way to trigger the BSoD. There must be
a way, will keep looking.

Edit: Seems it's supposed to crash on its own at random intervals for no
apparent reason. It's really just like the original.

~~~
4cao
So much to explore, and so much fun:

Defrag is a game of Snake with some old Nokia (I guess) monophonic ringtone
playing in the background.

"Manifest" is a randomly-generated hilarious equation, for example: "utf8 +
doge = web 3.0"

There's a Star Wars episode all in ASCII.

Inside /a/README.txt: 'Indeed, we have a "fuck the cloud" philosophy !'

Start → Run: "There's nowhere you can run..."

In "Cat Explorer" (browser) there is a bookmark under "INTERWEBZ" for "Mark
Zuckerberg's homepage" that appears to be genuinely his, back when he was 15
years old:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20021104225654/http://www.angelf...](https://web.archive.org/web/20021104225654/http://www.angelfire.com/ny/mez51/)

In some places it gets very modern though:

What If: "What if I told you / You can eat without posting it on Instagram"

In any case, no matter what you do, don't start Hydra.exe.

(And I still couldn't get the BSoD.)

~~~
zaat
>There's a Star Wars episode all in ASCII.

You can have it in your terminal too:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

~~~
VRay
Man, it was mind-blowing back in the day to see a video streaming from a
server right to your local machine in real time

------
72deluxe
I kind of miss how speedy and usable a desktop like this was. I remember
running Windows 95 on 64MB RAM (even did it on 16MB, barely) on a 486 DX2
66MHz (it was something someone else had thrown out, in the era of Pentium
IIs, I was poor).

And then installing RedHat 6.0 from a magazine cover CD and using FVWM and
wondering how I could make my feeble poor machine look like the glorious KDE2
and GNOME desktops gracing the pages of said magazine.

I miss KDE2's look TBH.

~~~
rconti
64MB?? _wow_. My 486/33 had 4MB. I eventually was able to upgrade to 16MB (I
think it cost like $400 though), and my linux kernel compile times went down
from 8 hours to 12 minutes. That was the day I _truly_ learned how much
swapping affected performance.

~~~
72deluxe
Yes, it was a bunch of SIMMs (I think - they had metal edge clips to destroy
your fingers compared to modern DIMM insertion) that they chucked out at
school (they gave them to me instead of binning them). It would have been more
normal for 16MB in the days when a 486 was mainstream but this was many many
years after 486 were considered ancient - 1998 to 2000 I think? I was poor and
my paper-round only stretched to buying Micromart and looking at computers I
couldn't afford.

------
ChrisArchitect
previous hits from past 1-5 years

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691597)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14531578](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14531578)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9162566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9162566)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8507786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8507786)

~~~
piqufoh
Grah - I had checked for previous posts, but only by pasting the URL into HN
search (no hits). I'll try harder next time, apologies for the noise.

~~~
djsumdog
Hackernews clears the existing post check after a given time period.
Refreshing old stuff occasionally is not against the rules and sometimes
encouraged because not everyone sees it the first time, or sometimes people
just like to comment on reruns.

------
Atheb
So it seems to be able to open itself quite well:
[https://imgur.com/a/dkEYrFW](https://imgur.com/a/dkEYrFW)

------
grawprog
Ahaha this is great, the laggy emulator, the unwinnable minesweeper, the
horrible delays caused by a system full of spyware and garbage. The desktop
seemed maybe a little bit too clean though, there wasn't icons half off the
screen or hidden entirely and it lacked the random files typically placed or
saved there because if it's not on the desktop it doesn't exist.

------
nojvek
Should remove the closing animations. They break the nostalgia.

lol! lena and virtual girl. You do realize there are women on this site right?
may be have it a bit less bro-ey ?

------
sterlind
Mad props for running completely smooth on Firefox Preview for Android. Drag
to select, double click, window resize, everything just works perfectly. Why
can't modern SPAs work as well?

~~~
virgil_disgr4ce
> Why can't modern SPAs work as well

Some do

~~~
ficklepickle
Very true. The ones that don't, I don't know what their excuse is.

Maybe they thought they would add performance later. Maybe they pulled in
dependencies willy-nilly without truly understanding the problem space. Maybe
it's a result of the frantic rush to add features.

Somehow it has become acceptable to keep users waiting for multiple seconds.
It's crazy and often unnecessary.

For example, I just built a trivia game PWA[0]. >1MB in size, including ~30
SVG illustrations. 7kb per game. Writing offline mode now, it will add ~1.45mb
but only once, at "install" time. It's only MVP but it's already fast.

Whatever the cause, it makes me very frustrated as a user and front ender.

------
cstross
Oh dear Cthulhu, I'd totally forgotten about the Hamsterdance!

~~~
Symbiote
That was one of the first daft websites I remember visiting, when it was first
possible to use the Internet on a computer at school. (That's _a_ computer,
the one with the dial-up modem.)

Start → Programs → hampster to see it here.

[1] [http://www.angelfire.com/id/hern/](http://www.angelfire.com/id/hern/) and
then open
[http://www.angelfire.com/id/hern/images/plasticjesus.wav](http://www.angelfire.com/id/hern/images/plasticjesus.wav)
and play it on repeat, since web browsers won't do this automatically any
more.

------
theandrewbailey
My vapors are waved.

------
calmconviction
Does anyone remember the address to a website that loaded basically a full
blown VM of a random vintage OS? This reminded me of that and I've been
wracking my brain to try to remember it

~~~
mpoteat
Search for Fabrice Bellard.

~~~
mcdevilkiller
Yes, this is it. He ported (and created) Qemu to JS using Emscriptem and we
can run differen OSes inside the browser. So cool!

------
aargh_aargh
Nitpick: Turbo C in DOSBox doesn't work by default. Options - Directories
point to C:\TC\ whereas Turbo C is actually installed in C:\\.

------
amiantos
"Safari is teh new Internet Explorer"

huh

~~~
jiofih
I find that quit upsetting since it’s clearly _the authors choice_ to not
support Safari and not any particular failure of the browser. It’s my goto
browser for everyday surfing, fast, light and with great standards support.

~~~
ShinTakuya
I can understand choosing not to support it. Safari is frustrating to web
developers because you can't legally test on it without owning Apple hardware.
Whereas Microsoft provides free virtual machines for testing on its browsers.
I've done the same thing on my personal sites - I've outright blocked Safari
with a message explaining that I won't unblock it until Apple provides a
Safari VM.

~~~
pugwash
They used to provide builds of Safari and Webkit for Windows; people
complained endlessly about the very fact of their existence. Apple stopped
providing them. True story.

Also, outright blocking Safari users is sort of obnoxious.

~~~
ShinTakuya
Sorry but that's not even remotely close to being the same. The Windows builds
were notoriously badly supported and were never equivalent from a debugging
perspective. Microsoft made a genius move by providing its IE VMs, and if
Apple didn't want to force developers into its ecosystem they'd have done the
same.

I agree that it's obnoxious, but I'd rather do that than deal with Safari
users complaining about bugs on my sites that I have no intention of buying a
Mac or breaking the law to fix. I'd rather avoid the bug reports and let the
users know that it's Apple fixing it. The sites I run are entirely free and
paid for out of my own pocket anyway, so I don't want my money going towards
people who support Safari. I've considered blocking Chrome, too, for other
reasons.

------
tartoran
This is quite impressive, I played with PukeData and it works quite well. And
the maze3d in ascii is quite brilliant too though I find it quite hard,
everything looks the same. And the Halflife 3 is mocking me, it appears to be
loading but keeps on initializing silly stuff like VR Pizza, etc..

~~~
tartoran
Oh and don't click Hydra.exe. It killed my session:)

~~~
jtvjan
Dr. Marburg is there for a reason.

------
A_No_Name_Mouse
My favorite site for when a colleague forgot to lock his PC. Win93, put the
browser in full screen mode and it looks like the PC has been haunted or
hacked. Took some of them minutes to find out what was going on, especially
because the programs are functional.

------
fireattack
Text rendering seems off. Some are clear but some are very blurry:
[https://i.imgur.com/G2lyFEY.png](https://i.imgur.com/G2lyFEY.png)

Is this intentional or just a bug?

~~~
benibela
I do not know, but I have another font problem
[https://i.imgur.com/VwMWcOm.png](https://i.imgur.com/VwMWcOm.png)

------
aliswe
Honestly using this on a phone is not very far from the android ui.

------
lqs469
Even there is a Half-life 3 and it's loading forever.

------
alexdumitru
This version of Minesweeper seems a bit hard to beat.

~~~
phoe-krk
Play around in the options to get the vanilla minesweeper.

~~~
vitorafsr
Disable "Troll mode" in "Options".

------
interweb
One of my favorite pieces of software art! Jankenpopp and Zombectro are
awesome artists... [http://jankenpopp.com/](http://jankenpopp.com/)
[http://zombect.ro/](http://zombect.ro/)

------
bastawhiz
Looking at the console, it's disappointing to see it trying to connect to (the
now defunct) Coinhive

------
weci2i
Was this inspired by Windows RG
([https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/winrg](https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/winrg))
?

It is obviously way more impressive but I’m surprised nobody else has
mentioned it.

------
tehlike
I forgot defrag was a thing. Whenever computer felt slow, run it to have your
placebo.

------
thinkloop
All the apps work, this must have taken forever, there's a full solitaire
game, ms paint, etc. each one not that easy to do in JS, well done. I wonder
why? It's a lot more than a proof-of-concept or prototype.

------
neogodless
I'm pretty upset that I couldn't outsmart the AI and win tic-tac-toe. I wrote
some tic-tac-toe "AI" a while back, and it wasn't as good as this one. I could
beat mine...

~~~
gugagore
Just in case someone doesn't know better, there are fewer than 300k possible
games of tic-tac-toe.

------
ebeip90
Weird quirk, but it seems that MineSweeper / BrianSweeper always places a mine
in the upper-right corner. I usually start here, and 30 games in a row it had
a mine in that position.

~~~
zackkitzmiller
There's always a mine no matter where you click first.

~~~
netsharc
I put a flag on a random square as a first move, and clicked the square next
to it, I didn't die!

------
gwbas1c
I'm kinda curious about the backstory. For example, the NES emulator is kinda
cool, (even though I can't get the arrow keys to work,) and each game is an
accomplishment in itself.

------
Emendo
This reminds me of a browser based computing environment demo (I believe it
was WebOS or MyWebTop) in the late 1990s. We have indeed come a long way in
the last 20 years.

------
smukherjee19
I found the Castle Gafa game... interesting, to say the least.

------
dfee
Open “Solitude” click “Game” -> “Yeah” and follow the instructions. You won’t
be disappointed.

> click and drag anywhere on the game to see the fun, thanks to mr doob

------
unnouinceput
Half-Life 3....confirmed

That one cracked me and my boy. Awesome.

------
have_faith
Progress Quest is a surprisingly engaging game

------
signaru
Amazing! It would be fun if they could somehow integrate jspaint.app which is
a very close replica of 90s MS Paint.

------
MayeulC
Doesn't work in a private browsing window on Firefox. It could be that local
storage is disabled, IIRC?

------
kempbellt
Very cool. Technology has come far.

Sidenote: Is it just me, or is the minesweeper game designed to make you lose
every time?

~~~
topaz0
I managed to beat it on intermediate.

~~~
smilekzs
How?

------
stuartd
Oh, this takes me back a long time. I kept a game of Progress Quest open for
far longer than I should have.

------
vcoelho
Wow, I don't know how I just missed modern browsers being able to run Game Boy
emulators.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Modern browsers can emulate Windows 95, which is a significantly more involved
feat than emulating a GB.

------
ComodoHacker
In the Trollbox chat log I see

>~anonymous is now known as wuhan-clan

Is this added lately? If so, its very convincing.

~~~
usrusr
Social media on windows93.net is a massive live UGC sandbox. Take for example
[https://myspace.windows93.net/](https://myspace.windows93.net/) , you could
spend days getting lost in retro parody reenactment without even wrapping the
experience in the windows93 desktop.

~~~
Tucanix
Can confirm, I got lost:
[https://myspace.windows93.net/?id=244](https://myspace.windows93.net/?id=244)

------
jasoneckert
This website has totally destroyed my productivity for the day. Thanks for
that! :D

------
SirLotsaLocks
Is there a current gen operating system that maintains this appearence style?

~~~
pedrogpimenta
Well, several Desktop managers for Linux have old-school Windows-like themes.
For example:
[https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95](https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95)

------
timplant
Thinking of days when I was a student playing wolfenstein 3d...

------
lichenwarp
Where is Visual Basic 6 enterprise when you're 13.

~~~
benibela
I had Delphi then

~~~
lichenwarp
Just saw this now, I wanted to switch but couldn't get my head around it and
what I was used to.

------
DerWOK
Most fun was: launching Brain Sweeper! ROFL!!1!

------
anthilemoon
The trollbox is probably the scariest part.

~~~
anonymfus
The worst part is that it's a real chat.

------
ryanmercer
Oops, lenna.png is definitely NSFW.

------
jonnycomputer
OS in a browser, and its snappy.

------
Yhippa
Doom works!

------
ryanmercer
Are you trying to get me fired? I started playing solitaire and was like wait,
you're at work dummy.

------
dbg31415
Lotta memories here. Thanks.

------
PatrolX
So good, so very very good!

------
parasanti
Defrag works as expected.

------
ouid
always upvote windows93

~~~
ngold
Half life 3 confirmed windows 93 exclusive

------
mshockwave
I like the Half-life 3

------
splatcollision
This is so superbad

------
bigyanshr
Good old days :D

