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Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

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This is such a great demonstration of both how fast JS engines have become in the browser, and how much less efficient native software has become overall. Running on top of an x86 emulator in JavaScript, it's still faster to pop open a file browser and click around than it is on some modern smartphones.

Most modern smartphones run Android, which means they have a bastardized Java VM between your "native code" and actual metal... not unlike having a JS VM.

It's not that "native software" has become less efficient, but rather that it is slowly disappearing.

As of Android 5.0, the Android Runtime (ART) compiles Dex bytecode ahead of time to native code. That probably still isn't as efficient as C++ or the like, because there's still a garbage collector, and Java methods are virtual by default.

  how fast JS engines have become in the browser

I am not so sure. It is more like "JS barely runs a software that has a recommendation of 66 mhz CPU".

Maybe it is about emulation the whole system but still I was expecting better.

I agree it is a very cool demo.

Is there anyway I can find out the call flow of this JS program?

Like to see the actual dynamic call flow graph instead of just simple static flow analysis output.

That's because the Win98 code is that much simpler. It has less to do with speed and more to do with complexity.

Your phone is doing all sorts of weird shit behind your back as you poke about. Stuff that it's not supposed to be doing if app-makers were actually respectful of their users...

On that note, why does that crap take so long on smartphones anyway?

One tweak that made my G2 feel much more responsive is simply turning down the UI animation length in Dev Settings. That's not to say that app developers don't love their non-native webview apps crammed to the brim with ads, though...

UI animations have a lot to do with it, but I'm more referring to UI jank over simple stuff like 'enumerating a list of sharing targets' or 'swiping to the next page of the launchboard' when the phone is otherwise idle. Or, my favorites: the multi-second pause from unlocking my phone during a phone/skype call, or the taking of an actual eternity just to answer said fucking Skype call, of which half the time the call has already hung up once my phone is finally responding...

That's why I switched to windows phone. It's a whole new experience. I can actually answer my phone without the obligatory wait for catch up before I can swipe to answer.

Had a client who later wanted me to do add all sorts of nasty things to an Android app template that I had made for him: Locking out primary navigation buttons, partially replacing the home app, spying on the user, and the capability to send out very expensive SMS texts and auto dial long distance phone calls. Unfortunately I was unavailable to do the addons he wanted, despite him asking repeatedly over the next 18 months. Never trust an Android app...

I think a big part of it is simply loading in resources and the like. Smartphones try to keep a _lot_ of apps in memory, so there's a lot of switching around.

Another thing is that Windows would put certain native widgets (like file selection) on a higher priority than other program code. Android, at least, tries to put as much stuff in userspace as possible, so you might be experiencing the reality if everything run at the same priority.

I miss the shitty machinery of win9x days[1]. The weird part is that I was deep into CGI, and compositors made so much sense to allow for all kind of graphical operations; yet.. I miss the refreshed icons, blinking cursor .. as if I was one to one with that simple machine.

That's very subjective, I'm in a minimalist passeist phase.

[1] Except for the non isolated driver model.

> I'm in a minimalist passeist phase.

> ...one to one with that simple machine.

Recommendation: Forth (cf. colorForth)

Warning: Save snapshot of current mental state/perspective/worldview first, to guarantee sustained mental health :P

I regularly scan (ansi|gnu|color|*)Forth webpages. Thinking Forth is on my mental shelf for so long. ML and Lisps keep delaying reading it.

> I regularly scan (ansi|gnu|color|)Forth webpages.
I occasionally do too :P
> Thinking Forth is on my mental shelf for so long. ML and Lisps keep delaying reading it.

I know the feeling... but I'm still at the "Lisp looks like parenthetical line noise, and what even is* ML?" stage, so I haven't yet tackled those.

Forth, to me, seems to be bring out the "mechanicalness" of the computer, in a weird sort of way. Of course it's just another programming language, but the philosophy and mentality behind it seems to lean in that direction. I like it for that, and its minimalism. :D

I love lisp and ml to bits, it's more that there's a whole cosmos to learn from there (type systems, macros, logic resolution, you name it).

I kinda understand the mechanicalness of Forth, if you mean that there's only a few principles and that even 'syntax' is built on that. The kind of less is more that frees your mind

I suspect smartphones to have crippled IO and memory subsystem. Marketing emphasize on "Hexa Core 128 bit Samsung silicon from the future" while the rest is subpar, leading to weird performance. JS engines are beautiful these days, especially given the adhoc nature of js, but a JVM should beat it hands down (based on blogs claiming reaching 1-3x C perf).

I ran this successfully on my smartphone...

You might think it's a great demonstration if you try it in a desktop browser.

Meanwhile, on actual mobile hardware, the performance is so atrocious it's completely unusable.

No knock on the implementors of course. But the idea that this demo has some deep insight about the performance of native smartphone software is just inaccurate.

http://cl.ly/2O0L3t290s37

I didn't mean to compare native mobile apps to web apps (though I see now how it could be read that way). I'm talking about native software in general. I chose smartphones for the comparison because they're the most notorious about being slow, even as their hardware performance approaches what PCs were like just a few years ago. Although even some desktop apps manage to be as janky and dog slow as almost anything from the Win98 era, e.g. iTunes until a couple of years ago. By contrast, the cheapest Third World market smartphone would run Win98 apps blinding fast.

In general there's an arms race between hardware getting faster and native developers getting more and more lazy about efficiency. On the desktop, the hardware is finally winning--it's just too damn fast. Hopefully that will happen with smartphones too.

> Although even some desktop apps manage to be as janky and dog slow as almost anything from the Win98 era, e.g. iTunes until a couple of years ago. By contrast, the cheapest Third World market smartphone would run Win98 apps blinding fast.

It is easy to take potshots at e.g. iTunes, but the real reason software "got worse" is not developers getting lazy. What happened is that expectations for CPU-intensive features rose (memory protection, ASLR, NX, encryption, low-latency audio, high-efficiency codecs, ClearType) while willingness to pay vanished. In Win98 times, you bought your music player from the developer (remember Winamp?) whereas now it comes free with your OS, which is itself probably free. So of course it is all half-assed now, but it's not "lazy" to spend resources on software someone will pay for, and not on software nobody will pay for.

You could absolutely reverse this, but it has nothing to do with native or web technology, and everything to do with changing consumer attitudes about choosing software.

> On the desktop, the hardware is finally winning--it's just too damn fast. Hopefully that will happen with smartphones too.

From 1995 until today, power consumption in desktop processors grew about 5-15x, depending on how exactly you measure. 5-15x more power on mobile devices is simply not an option, unless we have a "new physics" kind of breakthrough in both battery and thermal technology.

Willingness to pay didn't vanish, it's just that how we pay has changed. No, we don't pay for iTunes, but iTunes is the entry point to the iTunes store, so there's plenty of revenue coming in through that. And while iTunes and OSX are free, the hardware that OSX runs on makes up for that by being more expensive.

It's getting better (particularly on high-end phones) but single-threaded performance is still nowhere near circa-2013 desktop x86_64 (3.5ghz+ haswell). And it'll probably never catch up due to the thermal and battery life constraints.

"Never" is a very dangerous word to use considering that just 70 years ago, the ENIAC was created and that about 20 years ago, we were using Pentiums with 150-200MHz. The fact that we've come such a long way in such a short time means we probably have quite a ways to go, too.

This is actually really useful to me. I've been working on-and-off re-implementing Comic Chat using HTML5. It's nice having a working copy again to reference. The paper is great but it omits some details.

Comic Chat, like the program used to make jerkcity comics? Would be amazing to have a web version, best of luck!

Where does one start with such thing? I mean, where do I read how to emulate CPU (or at least how CPU works, so I would be able to come up with how to emulate it by myself), how does PS/2 work, how to boot an image from BIOS?

First you write a disassembler, then an interpreter for 16 bit mode. At that point you can already almost run FreeDOS.

Here are some resources:

http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2014/readings/i386/toc.htm

The official intel manuals

http://sandpile.org/

http://ref.x86asm.net/geek.html

http://stanislavs.org/helppc/idx_hardware.html

http://www.ctyme.com/intr/int.htm

http://wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page

If the reference manuals are overwhelming, I'd recommend to start by reading Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold. It covers how computers work for a general audience, from logic gates and boolean algebra, up to assembly, opcodes on the Intel 8080 processor, and how operating systems work. It was one of the most consequential books I've read, and I'd recommend it to both professional programmers and anyone else who is intellectually curious.

University courses? I'm pretty sure CPUs were a huge part of my first year of CS.

Learning about CPU internals was a huge part of your first year in CS? Where did you go to school?

At my school and every other school I'm remotely familiar with, the knowledge needed to emulate a CPU would be covered in upper division computer engineering courses, and not covered by CS undergrads at all, certainly not in their first year.

Bologna, Italy (from the school of Science, not Engineering). At the time (16+ years ago, under prof. Renzo Davoli), the introductory "Computer Architecture" course [1] was almost entirely dedicated to CPU architecture, including building basic ones (IIRC).

To be fair, I did drop out a year later :)

[1] http://www.unibo.it/en/teaching/degree-programmes/study-plan...

This kind of course (computer architecture) is typical of the cross CS/EE requirements and can usually be taken during any year of an undergraduate degree in CS. Prerequisites are minimal if any.

I taught that class once. It does have some prerequisites, but not a ton. I think it could be taken as early as second year, first semester at that particular school.

Back in 2007, my first semester in a technical CS school had plenty of assembly, binary, MMU emulation, OSI / TCP/IP, boolean math and so on.

I know this is mostly gone at this point, but it should not. The fundamentals are essentials. I often meet people who are totally clueless how a computer work and have CS degrees.

"How can you do C, it is so old? By now, we must have invented faster languages. Computers changed so much recently". Sure... Binary is now expressed with emoji.

Those aren't the fundamentals of CS. The fundamentals of CS are data structures and algorithms, as the Good Book says. Hardware is important, practically, but don't let practicality blind you to the actual core of the field: Practicality has a way of becoming obsolete, and an actual education is for life.

Meh. It's like saying that the fundamentals of film-making are writing and acting -- except writers and actors are nothing without an actual camera, and if you don't know how to place the camera and how to cut film produced by such camera, you will never get a film done. Cameras change, but you will never have a camera that miraculously materializes in all the right places to take exactly the shots you imagined. In the same way, some things will never change on the hardware side: you will always have inputs, outputs, memory, storage, human interfaces, power management, booting and so on.

The difference is that when people talk about hardware, they're talking about the equivalent of film, not abstract "this is central to being a camera which works with visible-spectrum light" concepts.

> you will always have [...]

> memory, storage

First, making a distinction between memory and storage is not an "at all times, in all places" kind of thing. It's more "this is what we do now, in the past, on some systems, it was different, and it may be different in the future" kind of thing. Single-level storage is not currently popular, but it was in the past and may yet come back. It already has, in some limited contexts.

Second, we've already seen home system storage go from paper tape to magnetic tape to magnetic disk to metallic magnetic disk to solid-state NAND Flash or close equivalent. Each has vastly different performance characteristics and details in every detail.

> human interfaces

I'm sure there are some iron-clad universals in HID. I don't know which of those translate from CLIs to touch-screens to gestural interfaces to speech recognition to pupil tracking to...

> power management, booting

Two things which have changed quite a bit even in the lifetime of "vaguely IBM PC-derived" desktop computers, and even moreso if you widen your scope up and down the power curve to include handheld systems and, you know, Real Computers What Do Real Work.

> we've already seen home system storage go from [...]

Yes, but the point is that there will always be a requirement to manage and persist the data you are working on somehow, and how you go about this somehow dramatically impacts (or should impact) the choices you make at the more abstract level of data structures. It is a fundamental concept that you will be forced to consider in one way or the other. You can have the fastest algo in the world crunching huge amounts of data, but if you then take an inordinate amount of time to store and retrieve results, it's as bad as having blazing-fast storage and crappy algos.

> I'm sure there are some iron-clad universals in HID

I agree that is traditionally considered a subclass of I/O, but I think in recent years we have seen that it's much more important than previously understood. Good software with mediocre UI is ignored while mediocre software with good UI can change the world. This is one of the few real discoveries in our field since the '80s.

>> power management, booting

> Two things which have changed quite a bit

... but are still there in some shape or form, and will forever be there. They are changing the world because people put effort and thought into them as fundamental parts of computing experiences, not one-offs that can be simply ignored as "constant time".

Those would also be the fundamentals of theatre, though, and film as a medium is essentially defined by its divergence from theatre. The fundamentals of film are cinematography and editing, but even this is theoretical compared to the craft of film-making. Just as CS includes the behaviors of Von Neumann machines with tapes, which is abstract compared to the science of e.g. processor die doping.

Wow. My first semester of computer science had me studying fuckin' Gofer.

It was a technical school with very practical teachers. The lack of "theorists" probably helped a lot. Most of them were either from the video game industry or 80's embedded developers. In Quebec (Canada), a technical school teacher unlikely is to have a PhD. Technical schools and universities are 2 different "level". You can take technical school (CEGEP) as a pre-university degree (or you can end there and get the equivalent of an associate degree). When taking a CS one instead of science, you "lose" 1 year, but it is much more fun. Too bad they replaced the system programming courses with web ones a couple of years ago.

All that to say that sometime, having real industry veterans as teachers really influence the teaching point of view.

As in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29, right, the precursor to HTTP?

Nope, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gofer_%28programming_language%..., the neutered Haskell clone.

Don't get me wrong, I certainly think that functional programming has its place in the world, but as a first year uni student all fired up about finally learning "real" programming after years of teaching myself (back before the internet laid everything out on a platter), I was not impressed.

Eh, same with me and Scheme.

I don't think functional paradigms can really be appreciated by 1st/2nd year undergrads. At that age you are fundamentally impatient to make your mark in a practical sense, your approach will be instinctively imperative. You have to hit the wall (scaling / parallelism / thread management / complexity etc) before you start to really appreciate the upsides of functional paradigms.

Unfortunately, a lot of professors are actually terrible educators (after all, they did not get there by teaching but by researching) and think the learning process is as linear as house-building: "place bricks here and there so that your next row will be this way and that way". They also think people should enjoy programming for programming's sake, whereas a lot of people are motivated by a creative process driven by outcomes.

> your approach will be instinctively imperative

Not necessarily (based on being an assistant in lab sessions for first year students learning Haskell).

But what it did do was put everyone on the same level, including the arrogant students who "already knew how to code" and hadn't listened (or attended) the lectures.

I think they chose a functional language to start with good habits for thinking about what to implement, not how to implement it. If you don't know what the problem is, you should work on that, rather than bashing out some Java...

I got a solid understanding of CPU operations in my undergraduate computer architectures class, in my CS degree. Of course, it was probably a third year class. First year sounds a little unusual.

We covered it in the first quarter of the CS program at The Evergreen State College. After a few weeks of being introduced to digital logic, each student had to draw (with an application called Logisim) a simulated simple-as-possible Von Neumann machine up from logic gates and wires. Then we had to write short math programs for them directly into the RAM. Fortunately, Logisim lets you save components as something like functions or macros so it wasn't too repetitive. This project demo video by someone who took the same course shows what the result looks like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8qEz4DwFIg

It was challenging, but it was awesome (and finding that video to illustrate my comment is a blast of nostalgia). It wasn't any harder than most other CS or other sciences courses. And after digital logic, the other CS topics aren't really prerequisite or especially helpful in learning how simple processors work. I really appreciated getting straight to the foundations of how computers work and building up from there.

It wasn't like emulating x86 in javascript, but it was CPU internals. Up until I read your comment, I just assumed this was standard CS stuff.

I was equally shocked at the state of CS education at University of New South Wales here in Australia. They don't seem to cover many fundamentals (like CPU, algorithms and data structures, operating systems) compared to what I am used to in Europe. Either not at all in the undergrad curriculum or only very late.

In my US school we don't even write our own compiler in programming languages class. Europeans seem to learn a ton more.

I studied math at university, and did CS as a minor. They made me take data structure and algorithm classes for both.

The mathematician's version was half as long, but covered the material in more depth: ie they proved every result. The CS version was full of dumbed down and full of fluff. (And even those CS people did operating systems and compilers as undergrads.)

First year, second semester we learned binary logic, system bus, how a CPU works, etc. I think it was seen as the foundation so you actually understand how a computer works.

Me too, but there's a huge gap between the often simplified CPUs they teach you on at Uni' and programming for the querks in x86, or any of the buses/peripherals/interfaces.

I didn't learn much more than assembly 101. I doubt I could emulate much real hardware. Certainly not a PC of all things... A gameboy looks more accessible...

Wow, advocating higher education on HN. Feeling bold today?

I've not really enjoyed my time in higher-ed (and I have little to show for it), but sometimes it's really the only place where unfashionable but fundamental topics are covered in depth. My comment was meant as a pointer (i.e. "check out lecture recordings etc") rather than a quip.

Really? Because it sounded exactly like a snarky troll.

0xffff2 - I can't reply directly to you for some reason but I went to UC Berkeley many years ago and the third undergrad course, CS 61C, laid the basic groundwork for beginning to understand CPUs. Here's the syllabus from the most recent semester. http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61c/sp16/

What university did you go to?

My university didn't touch on hardware until the second half of second year, and that was only one paper (strictly speaking, a computer engineering paper).

Yeah, I always feel the same when I see similar things. How do you even start?

Personally, I had some courses on computer architectures, and those covered the theory of how CPUs are constructed, how they run programs, etc. I decided to write an NES emulator. So: - Find Wikipedia articles, and learn that it used a variant of the MOS Technology 6502, which was used in a lot of computers in the 80s.

- Find some digitized assembly programming manuals from the time (I think the one I used was distributed with the Commodore 64, and ended up having several typos introduced by OCR).

- Write a tool to recognize, decode, and print out an operation when you feed it a little data

- You basically need to set up a loop of fetching instructions, interpreting them, then doing what they say. An actual CPU runs in a similar loop, and it generally doesn't stop until power is removed,

I think that after the classes I took, I read a lot of what other emulator writers said. This article is a basic look at the structure of an emulator, the theory behind them, and some different designs: http://fms.komkon.org/EMUL8/HOWTO.html

One of my friends at uni wrote a Z80 emulator/assembler in PDP-10 assembler as a hobby project - and he was studying chemistry, not CS...

I don't understand why a basic understanding of CPU architectures isn't a CS fundamental everywhere.

Even if you have no interest in emulating a CPU or an OS, you really do need to know what registers are, how caches work, what interrupts do, and how basic IO happens.

At the very least it's a practical demonstration of one particular kind of VM, and - if you want to - you can generalise from that to VMs of your own design.

For web apps, not understanding these things can get expensive. Cycles, even cloud cycles, aren't free, and if you take zero interest in optimisation and efficiency you're literally throwing money away.

Agreed. It's important to understand how the hardware works, at least at the theoretical level. If you don't understand what the machine is doing, it's hard to say that you really understand how your program works.

Very nice. Although opening IE and trying to go to http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98 gave an error. Go figure...

It doesn't have internet.

You might be able to compile the js down to a single copy paste into a file then load that in ie.

I'm going to guess it won't work in IE from 1998 though.

It must be designed to quietly prevent winception.

That's amazing - do you have any info on the underlying implementation?

It's a fully emulated PC: CPU, memory, hard drive, … The CPU especially took me very long to get right with all the details to run Windows 98.

The code is here: https://github.com/copy/v86

NSA backdoor!

https://github.com/copy/v86/commit/159f565de4dd99bff9b46c45a...

Nope, Windows 98 undefined instruction.

Yep!

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20041215-00/?p=...

Incredibly impressive. Greetings and high fives from the intertubes.

Do you worry that Microsoft might threaten you for the Windows 98 image? I don't think they make a cent from it anymore, but big companies and common sense aren't common bedmates.

So far Microsoft haven't even sent me a C&D for https://win95.ajf.me/, and that site got media attention!

This is the most impressive part! Well done! So in theory, we can run anything that a real PC can run, albeit a Win98 speced PC. Any takers to get the next generation in the Windows series to run on it. WinXP? I think.

PS: Just came across the HN discussion around the said x86 emulator.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6567967

This is amazing. Really great work. Thanks for building this.

Thanks for that

How would v86 compare to jslinux speedwise? http://bellard.org/jslinux/

ELKS in javascript would be nice as well, you would get the ultimate speedy portable unix ecosystem in the browser. https://github.com/jbruchon/elks

Poorly, see https://github.com/s-macke/jor1k/wiki/Benchmark-with-other-e...

Primarily due to the use of asm.js. I intend to implement a JIT similar to QEMU's tcg as soon as Web Assembly supports it: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FutureFeat...

Great work on your emulator. I am also looking forward to use webassembly for my emulator when available. However, I don't expect much speed improvement. I guess you can speed up your emulator significantly by putting in some '|0' noops to prevent deoptimizations into double precision.

It's stuff like this that makes me wish I had unlimited side project time. I think this could be fun to work on but my assembly/C level programming skills would need some serious ramp-up. Great work though!

Minesweeper! Ah, the nostalgia.

A note: the mouse position and acceleration seems to not be mapped correctly. It is often separated away from my local desktop mouse position. Maybe because the screen resolution is different?

Click the lock mouse button

I'm having the same issue. It makes it difficult to do anything, because I would need to move my actual mouse pointer past the edge of my monitor to get to any of the icons or start menu with the virtual mouse.

You gotta lock the mouse. Most likely, something's emulating a physical mouse input, which is inexact.

My first laptop was a 10 year old hand me down Windows 95 laptop (literally, as old as me) that I used just to play Space Cadet Pinball. I can't believe they took it out of Windows 98; what a great game haha

Are there license issues around this project? I doubt Microsoft would care to put the resources into enforcement of windows 98 licenses but I am just curious about the legality.

Essentially you are being given a copy of a VM that has a copy of Windows pre-installed. It's unlikely (but possible) that Microsoft has granted a license for this. I imagine this is technically not legal, but as you say, unlikely to matter much.

Microsoft does not seem to bother with older software. It is because they don't support and upgeade it anymore.

Microsoft only goes against piracy of software they still support and upgrade.

They don't bother with the old software because it isn't worth it to sue or send a c&d letter because they don't earn an income with it anymore. So they don't lose income if someone pirates software they no longer sell.

In fact they gave away the source code to an early MS-DOS and MS-Word as part of their own open source license.

It is good PR for them if someone emulates their old software in the web browser and gives them free publicity.

That is brilliant. Little things like being able to change the screen resolution and waste time on Solitaire - what more could one want!!! Works amazingly.

Also it is quite a historical artefact, things like Active Desktop were truly cool back in the day. Plus the simplicity of the Win98 UI is a joy to return to.

Congratulations!

The start menu is pretty nice, compared to the awful "launch pad" style full-screen app menus that are now in OS X, GNOME, and Windows...

This is awe-inspiring. I don't know what to say -- except that, if it was faster, I'd try to run Windows 98 in the browser of Windows 98 in the browser.

The network interface doesn't seem to be configured – when I try to open the browser it wants me to install a modem. Is the VM just not configured for that, or do I need to do something? Would love to see what today's web looks like on '98 IE :)

It's possible, Windows 98 has drivers for the NE2000 network card we're emulating (https://github.com/copy/v86/blob/master/src/ne2k.js). However, currently the emulation isn't accurate enough, Windows 98 refuses to use it.

The bigger problem would be what to connect it to, and how. You can't make arbitrary outbound connections from Javascript.

I have a barely working HTTP proxy in client-side-JavaScript here: https://github.com/ysangkok/browser-http-proxy

This allows you to connect to CORS enabled sites without using the WebSocket proxy. It talks HTTP on the serial port.

I want to add SNI support to tlstunnel so that I can tunnel to google.com by navigating to https://google.com.mydomain/ and having the snitunnel tunnel to http://google.com by reading the bottom-level domain names using SNI.

Using this with browser-http-proxy, it would be possible to tunnel to HTTP sites on a request-based level (making it easier to scale) and without relying on tun/tap on the server. Also it could serve as a fallback for non-CORS enabled hosts.

We're using this proxy script: https://github.com/benjamincburns/websockproxy

I can't wait until it works, you must ping HN again when it does!

Really cool work. Looking forward to updates.

When I tried to run Internet Explorer and open a website, the window closed (crashed I guess).

I really want to open some common websites on Win 98 :D

They don't tend to work (you end up clicking a "script error" acknowledgement a lot). It's less fun than it sounds like it would be.

It breaks horribly if you click start->run, type "command" and press enter

Yep, unfortunately it seems to be a driver issue, because I'm having the same problem in QEMU. These are the drivers: http://www.navozhdeniye.narod.ru/vbe9x.htm

The inclusion of eSheep is an absolute stroke of genius.

sheep.exe, hello old friend

I _totally_ remember it.

Running con\con works, too. Just like I remember it :)

Haha! That was the first thing I tried, had a good laugh again :-)

I still remember you could crash remote computers by going into a public forum and post an image that linked to c:\con\con

What a coincidence, I was just thinking about how nice it would be if I could start a minimal javascript linux with toybox and start spacemacs with it (< 64M) and a small mounted filesystem somewhere.

Win 3.11 in the browser would be nice too, there is a whole ecosystem of apps. Windows95b would be slower, but still faster and smaller then Windows98.

I wonder how fast civ1 would run on freedos here.

95 in the browser has already been done (by me): https://win95.ajf.me/

That uses Em-DOSBox, which is more limited than v86 (which the OP uses) in some respects. I think v86 is loading hard disk sectors on-demand, which is pretty amazing compared to Em-DOSBox which has to download a massive disk image. On the other hand, Em-DOSBox has sound support!

The Internet Archive has 3.11 in the browser: https://archive.org/details/win3_stock (there's also various 3.x games as well)

This also uses Em-DOSBox.

Dude, I'm just trying to align text in CSS, and you're all like "here's an OS in js."

Is this legal?

I'm surprised MS hasn't open-sourced NT 3.x already.

Windows before 30 years of updates that were created with a need to maintain backwards compatibility feels so cohesive. I mean, that control panel is just so clean.

Also, would be interested in seeing the orginal Win 95 (before OSR2). It was way way faster than win 98.

The control panel in newer versions could still be that clean if Microsoft hadn't tried to reinvent it three times (XP, Vista, 8).

Of course, the 9x control panel is, in a way, a reinvention of the 3.x control panel. It's just a very clean one, because the 3.x control panel was a window full of icons, and the 9x control panel is an Explorer window full of icons.

"My Briefcase" could have been Dropbox, 10 years earlier, if only 1) it could work decently, which it never did, and 2) had an option to sync to MS servers. Bandwidth was an issue at home, back then, but for offices it would have been fine.

Microsoft spun its wheels a lot with file-syncing in the mid-2000s. Aside from the stuff coming from Office (Groove, etc) and Windows (folder-shadowing, BITS, etc), there was a slew of inter-related products in the consumer space starting with the acquisition of FolderShare. By the time DropBox launched, it had become Mesh.com, with PC-to-PC syncing and online storage, but thanks to internal competition and constant rebranding/repositioning, it slowly became deprecated and subsumed by SkyDrive/OneDrive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Mesh

In the age of 4.3 GB drives that cost $750, unlikely.

It was also the age of the average file being 20kb though. You could have provided 50mb per user and the world would have gone "woah".

I remember how amazing it was when the email accounts went from 20mb max size to something like 500mb, it blew my mind and gave rise to many services that capitalized on this huge amount of space (mostly peer-to-mail and an application that turned gmail accounts into a dropbox kind of thing).

This is really impressive, and also brings back waves of nostalgia as I used to use Windows 98 (and 95 and 3.11 before that) as my daily driver.

I like how the cloud icons at the side of Explorer when not in classic mode still are drawn with a white background even if you change the colour scheme.

On a real machine, when I look at this old system I realise how little we have moved on in UI terms or the basic needs and requirements of a computer. You could do 99% of what you need to do on an old computer, other than duff website rendering and horrible security and power usage.

Best part, it comes with scmpoo.

How bad is it that Windows 98, running in a ^%%^@#!ing emulator, in my browser no less, runs better than the latest versions of Android OR iOS?

I'm on a beefy 12-core 'nix box with 64 GB of RAM, and this emulator is extremely sluggish for me.

Perhaps because it doesn't run well for everyone?

Oh, I wouldn't call this emu fast... but its still faster than a lot of smartphones I encounter

uhh it doesn't? Maybe it runs way better than the android or iOS emulators but you have to have a pretty messed up install of recent Android to make it run as slow as this.

Doesn't seem to work too well on Windows 10. It might be missing some DLLs. /s

Super cool! (I really can't get it to click on anything though)

You can use the Lock mouse button. You will be able to click on what you want.

The Lock mouse button helped with my first problem which was that the emulated cursor seemed to be scaling its position based on the side of my browser window instead of the size of the emulated window. Locking the mouse fixed the position issue but I'm still unable to click on anything though.

Once you go into fullscreen mode it seems it work fine, but it took me a while to figure this out...

Ah right, thanks! Ctrl+R, regedit

Now only if we had a version that could connect to the internet. Right now it tells me that it can't find a modem and that I should call MSN Technical Support! Cute.

Respect! This and Fabrice Bellard's emulator have me in awe. http://www.bellard.org/jslinux/ It's even more painful when I know that technically I should be able to do the same, but have not yet done it ...

But is the A20 gate being properly emulated? :) I know a verification engineer who left AMD because he was tired of dealing with the ancient testbench which checked the ancient hardware.

The browser should run in the hypervisor and provide a real hardware virtual machine. Provide both ARM and x86, one is emulated and one is real.

It's not. I haven't come across any software that relied on it.

Somewhat infamously, GRUB failed on Intel Macs (in 2006?) because it tried to use the A20 gate, and Apple refused to emulate it. It's fixed now, though.

Very old (as in pre-386, or even pre-286) DOS software, written for the PC and only the PC, might depend on it. If I remember correctly, archive.org has a whole section devoted to ancient DOS software, so you might find something in there.

Anyone tried to make a plan9 in browser?

oh the irony, Win98 was the MS "internet as desktop" release. Least favorite OS ever

Awesome project though!

Windows ME was my most disliked OS (too buggy, even after service packs). I think the level of complexity finally hit the wall given the 9x series lack of good memory/file protections.

My favorite 9x OS is 98 SE (which was a stand-alone release, not a service pack). But 98 "first edition" did add substantial features to 95: IE 4, multi-monitor support, sfc was added (which was useful because 9x got corrupted a LOT), ACPI support, better plug and play, and better hardware support overall.

98 SE just added USB support out of the box (which was a big deal for those of us trying to use USB mice), IE 5, WebDAV, Windows Explorer improvements, ICS, improved WMP, and all of 98 "first editions" hotfixes and updates. You could make 98 "first edition" into 98 SE more or less, but 98 SE was a nice thing to "just install" and have everything work.

My 1990s/early 2000s OSs looked like this: 3.1, 95, 98, 98 SE, ME, back to 98 SE, and then 2000, XP SP1, and beyond. Skipped XP pre-SP1 as it was a pretty shoddy release compared to 2000 at the time, and ran away from ME screaming.

I ran all of those windows versions as well, but my favorite remains NT4. I stuck with that for a long time, until the lack of drivers forced an upgrade. It was incredibly fast (smooth on a 66 mhz 486), rock-solid (uptimes of weeks with daily use), light-weight (32 MB RAM was doable, 128 MB was multi-tasking heaven). It's nice that MS is trimming down windows lately, but I keep thinking that it's a bit like seeing someone who has let themselves go get back on a diet. If they hadn't put on the weight in the first place, they would have never needed to lose it.

ME lasted about 30 mins from installation to BSOD in my case. never tried again.

my god that was ages ago.

Dos6+Win 3.11, OS/2 2 and 3, Win98se were the best, XPsp3 as well. Win ME had one good thing going for it: window transparancy and alpha blending! For that reason I used it with a HMD, backstrapped laptop and webcam.

I still remember going to Circuit City and buying the Win98 upgrade CD and excitedly installing it as a kid. I miss those days to say the least.

It was very unstable. But I still like the UI, and have tried to replicate the simplicity in every machine I have had ever since.

So pulled this up from my Chromebook - rather interesting to have Chrome running Windows rather than the other way around. Of course the big leap will come when it gets Win XP up and running and then folks will have an answer for their legacy systems...

Let's see, now I can browse :

IE in Win98 in Chrome in Ubuntu in VMWare in Win7

How does this compare to Em-DOSBox (e.g. https://win95.ajf.me/) in terms of speed?

How does it compare to Windows RG?

http://www.deanliou.com/WinRG/

Doesn't work on my Android phone, in Chrome.

But I didn't expect it to :)

Edit: for what it's worth, FreeDOS boots there. No way to put in keyboard input though.

Install Hacker Keyboard from fdroid (or the Play Store...). There's an option for a persistent notification that you can click, which will enable the keyboard wherever.

Booted and works fine on my Nexus 9 running Chrome and Android Marshmallow (CyanogenMod 13).

Works on my iPhone!

Someone needs to port SLiRP to JavaScript+CORS.

And here's me fighting with running Android ARM code on x86 ... I wish I had more time.

Any suggestions on how to upload software?

Could I use kermit, xmodem, ymodem, zmodem through com 1?

Awesome, it works also on my Windows phone browser ( that is Internet Explorer :)

Any tips on how I can reliably trigger a BSOD? For old time's sake.

Open the Run panel and try to go to "C:\con\con". Instant BSOD. (This was an old trick I used to do as a bratty kid when people left their computers unlocked. Nice to see that it still works!)

You can also just shutdown (ie click start and then select shutdown) that caused a BSOD for me.

I found this very ironic.. It died while trying to die.

I am really impressed by this.

I am sure you put a lot of labor into this project.

You also seeded lots of ideas...

Thank you.

It would be fun to see the BSOD in my browser just for nostalgia.

This blows my mind.

This reminded me of www.windows93.net

start->command->fail

(command as in command.com)

Amazing work.

The mouse cursor doesnt work.... my system's real cursor is still onscreen and the emulator is doing a very poor job of tracking my movements, and its not intercepting clicks or anything like that either.

None of the toy 'show HN' emulators that have popped up have a properly working mouse cursor....

It worked after clicking on lock mouse. Using the latest firefox.

That works. Chromium 47 here

Did you try the lock cursor button? A lot of times in Windows VMs I have to go disable mouse acceleration, but it doesn't seem this version of Windows 98 has that option.

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