Run Windows 2000 in your browser | Hacker News Reader

Run Windows 2000 in your browser

bellard.org

190 pointswaivek78 comments

Windows 2000 was a great OS, I preferred it over XP for as long as it was feasible. Back when Windows XP was released, activation was considered quite intrusive in privacy sense and Windows 2000 was the last release without it. Oh have times changed.

to the point that whenever I run post win nt machine without theming or compositing I get happy. Seeing that old UX brings all kinds of good memories.

Same goes for classic Mac OS.

I never had a lot of love for the System 7 style, but the Copland/MacOS 8 style was gorgeous

I always loved how Mac OS X Server 1.0 (aka Rhapsody) looked. I never got to use it, but it looked like Copland and NeXTStep had a kid (which is basically what it was).

I'm pretty sure at some point I used a Rhapsody Kaleidoscope theme on my PowerMac G4...

true

fvwm4lyfe

Actually XP was a slight modification over 2000, specially graphically. Hence the version naming 5.0 and 5.1.

I remember Microsoft held back updates to Windows 2000 to force people to upgrade.

I remember USB and wifi support in particular being painful. When I finally had to cave in, I was not happy.

How times have changed indeed :)

I ran 2k until i wanted to do a hardware upgrade, and the install didn't like the new motherboard (yes i switched the driver on the disk controller). Tried to get XP going, and ran into some complications. Said "fuck this!" and reached for a Linux distro...

Still Windows 2000 was more oriented to servers (which btw was the main business for the NT line until XP). You could easily mistake an XP for 2000 if you removed the skinning.

I removed all the graphical changes for performance reasons on older boxes. People thought it was Windows 2000 as you said.

I think situation was kind of the same with Vista and 7. Lots of the groundwork was laid in the first release but the later one was the more polished one that got the big sales.

Nope, Vista is 6.0 and 7 is, well, 7.0.

It's 6.1, you can look at the build version. The same thing as 2000 and XP

You're right, sir, I remembered wrong. In fact I was even stunned back then lol.

Windows 2000 + security updates + WiFi support would be my perfect operating system.

Security updates would only be patches against coding errors and the like, but the architectural security until Vista was defective, and no amount of patches (without changing the OS so much it would have to be considered another one anyway) could fix that.

That sounds pretty close to ReactOS

I seem to recall a rumor that the XP activation system came to be because the BSA threatened to exclude Microsoft unless the latter implemented it.

i skipped winXP completly, at the end ran a highly customized version (got it from kazaa and then improved on it). even managed to install lot of winxp only software on 2000 (thx to massive registry editing) then directly to mac.

Architectural security until at least Vista was, hm, let's say weak.

FYI: internet actually works in it. If you start IE in it, you get the network connection wizard, choose lan and let it auto configure, and it works. IE will go to a default msn.com page that it will be unable to actually render, but google.com works. But wikipedia over https not for some reason

That's because MSIE uses an operating system component for SSL/TLS, and the version of that component on Windows 2000 has only insecure or weak ciphers, and none of them is accepted by Wikipedia's servers. According to qualys (https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/viewClient.html?name=IE&vers...), even on Windows XP it knows only insecure ciphers (small key size or the broken RC4 cipher) and weak ciphers (3DES has a small block size, which is now considered insecure).

IE6 and below need TLS 1.0 or http. It is the same reason stackoverflow doesn't work

https://nickcraver.com/blog/2017/05/22/https-on-stack-overfl...

Also note there's plenty of other interesting stuff on the site, too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bellard.org

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

Looks like he's working with business coaching/consulting ... I found this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu241uoLJSQ The audio quality is bad, but there's some nice stuff in there like what successful businesses does right and vice versa.

I somehow do not believe this is the Fabrice Bellard.

The title and description say "Fabrice Beillard", so, no.

This is amazing. Even the web browser works. I wonder how that works since cross-domain AJAX calls are usually not possible.

From the FAQ: https://bellard.org/jslinux/faq.html

> Can I access to the network from the virtual machine ?

> Yes it is possible. It uses the websocket VPN offered by Benjamin Burns (see his blog[1]). The bandwidth is capped to 40 kB/s and at most two connections are allowed per public IP address. Please don't abuse the service.

[1] http://www.benjamincburns.com/2013/11/10/jor1k-ethmac-suppor...

They are if you use a proxy.

Just an example I made a while back: https://gist.github.com/tahabsim/95cffa72905d811fef4f4882f40...

Note, though, I do not know how this site is doing so.

There's a few in browsers OSes on http://copy.sh/v86/ too, it seems to be an independent effort.

The one linked here is based on JSLinux [1]. All done by Fabrice Bellard of QEMU fame. If you look at the list, this is the first Microsoft Windows version running in JSLinux. Heck, its the first time a proprietary OS runs in JSLinux. Before, it was only Linux and FreeDOS.

What you linked is also based on QEMU btw.

[1] https://bellard.org/jslinux/index.html

This is why I said it's (seemingly) an independent effort. I've seen JSLinux before and heard of Fabrice Bellard before due to QEMU, TCC and FFmpeg. The one in my comment is done by another person named Fabian Hemmer. I'm not sure what your point here is while I just linked a similar project.

Where did you take the information that what I linked is "based on" QEMU? Its readme only mentions using QEMU's (and KVM's) tests/test cases and sounds like an original work with regards to the emulator itself: https://github.com/copy/v86/blob/master/Readme.md

You're right, it seems not to be based on QEMU code (which is programmed in C) but a full-blown JavaScript implementation of x86-32.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Would this possibly run Windows ME? Well, as much ME ever ran at least.

To be fair, ME was an abberation. Win2000, WinXP SP2/3 and Win7 were good releases.

ME was the last installment of the 9x kernel series (not a surprise the 9x line died...), while 2000 and follow ups were NT kernel.

ME was some kind of weird hybrid as best i recall. No that i dealt with it much beyond trying to rescue some failing installs.The main thing i recall was that it booted all the way to the UI layer before getting scandisk going...

ME had the new (from NT) WDM driver model, which caused quite a bit of issues when mixed with older drivers. It was an end-of-the-road hybrid.

How does this work with the licensing? It runs in your browser, so you need a valid license and not the host?

They have a disclaimer: https://bellard.org/jslinux/disclaimer.html

> "All commercial support for Windows 2000 ended on 2010-07-11 so we believe it does not harm its copyright holder(s) to keep it online."

I doubt MS agrees.

> "It is published for digital preservation and demonstration purposes only."

But on the other hand it could be used for other purposes (such as for avoiding paying windows license to run windows programs), so I again doubt MS will agree.

It’s up to copyright holders to enforce their copyright. They can choose at any time to start or stop or restart doing so, for any reason, as long as the term of the copyright has not expired.

I’ll say this, if someone made a prediction market, I’d put down $10 on 70% odds that Microsoft won’t try and enforce in this case. They’re trying to reach out to developers these days, and suing Fabrice over this interesting project would piss off a lot of developers. But I accept the 30% odds that they may just pursue enforcement anyway.

In my opinion, Fabrice Bellard showing a VM in HTML5/JS with Windows 2000 is a great honor for Microsoft, not a harm at all, quite the contrary :-)

Can you even get a license for Win2000 anymore... ? I expect no license from that era would consider a scenario like this anyway.

It's a bit of a clusterfuck [1] but you can buy a license to a newer version of Windows and exercise downgrade rights if you've got your old Windows 2000 media and product keys around, or something:

> It is also important to understand that although Microsoft grants downgrade rights we do not necessarily provide the means (media and product keys) to downgrade. So what does this mean? In order to downgrade software you will need the bits of the earlier version or edition and a product key. Microsoft only supplies bits and product keys to Volume License customers and only for certain versions and editions of the software. Volume Licensing customers have access to the Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) where they will have access to the current version and the prior version of the software they have licensed. We refer to the current version of software as version “n” and the prior version of the software as n-1. There are also certain core Microsoft products that we provide n-2 and occasionally n-3 versions of the software via the VLSC. Software titles where n-2 and n-3 versions are available can be viewed here. If you have legally obtained physical media for earlier Microsoft products that your organization is currently licensed to use through downgrade rights, you may use that media for downgrades.

And in fact, despite it being Windows Server 2000 you can exercise downgrade rights from Windows 10 Pro [2]. All the way back to Windows NT 3.51!

[1] https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/licensing/2013/02/06/dow...

[2] https://download.microsoft.com/download/6/8/9/68964284-864d-...

Isn't Windows 2000 the only one where Microsoft doesn't distribute the media anywhere, because of Java?

Right. When I last checked, you can get as low as Windows 3.1 from MSDN.. but not 2000.

Whether a vendor offers any kind of licensing for a software product and whether a vendor still has active copyright are two different matters.

If a vendor refuses to offer a license for a reasonable sum perhaps the law should allow a petition to relinquish the copyright and place the work in the public domain, the petition going to the relevant authority (the UK IP Office comptroller probably in the UK?).

Or just let Google bypass the law and no-one else, as happened with orphaned books.

Perhaps it should, but currently it certainly does not; the copyright holder has the exclusive right to offer this product, and if they choose not to do so, noone else can.

That gets really fuzzy though, as I'm sure there's components in Windows 10 that's also present in Windows 2000. Are they required to relinquish those to the public domain as well?

I did have a customer asking if my software would run on Windows 2000 recently.

Now you know why; He wanted to run it in the browser.

Anyone know how this works?

It's a full blown x86 emulator written in javascript.

ntoskernal missing...

Maybe your ad blocker is breaking things?

The server also appears to be under very heavy load right now.

"I can boot the OS because an ad-blocker prevented download of the kernel."

I guess we really do live in the future.

Insert joke about EA going into the OS business and asking for money to download USB 3.1 drivers here.

Then again, we already had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Upgrade_Service

Hey that's not fair. They would also give you the option of unlocking it yourself by gaining enough points by accomplishing arbitrary challenges. You only have to pay if you don't want to play along, silly.

I think the site is under load and the kernel loading is timing out.

EDIT: Yeah, it can't transfer the files in time. It doesn't help that the image files are set to no-cache and the browser reloads them every time. I wish he had published it on IPFS.

I couldn't run it today, but I remember a few months ago it ran fine. The load hypothesis seems right.

Surely the ad blocker would only block Windows 10?

how about Netscape 3.01 in a browser?

Every time I doubt the myth of the 10x programmer I go look at Fabrice Bellard's site.

Just look at his 2001 winning International Obfuscated C Code Contest self-hosting C compiler: http://www0.us.ioccc.org/2001/bellard.hint

He won the year before too, with a program which found the largest known prime number.

In 2009 he wrote a program which he used to calculated Pi to the most digits ever (at that point), on a desktop PC. He broke the previous record which was set on a 640 nodes supercomputer.

(Oh yes, original author of QEMU and FFMPEG too)

I've always been under the impression that the dismissal of the "myth of the 10x programmer" was more about its use as a general hiring filter rather than whether there exist prolific programmers (examples of whom seem readily available).

Perhaps we should split up the myths:

1) myth of the 10x programmer - true

2) "we hire 10x programmers" - look at salaries - false (even for companies like Google and Facebook, who hire -at best- 1.5x programmers)

Price's Law suggests that the square root of the number of workers in a particular domain constitute half the productivity. This means if a particular office has 100 coders, 10 of them make up half the total productivity. So the top performers are doing ~5% of the total work each, while the regular performers, on average, are doing 0.5%. So statistically every place with 100 developers has ten 10x coders whether that's Google or anywhere else.

You can't dismiss all of them as 1.5x. Recall the binary patching done by Microsoft a few days ago. That's the work of at least a 5x guy if not 10x.

Also this is pretty silly.

Fabrice Bellard is a god among programmers, his contributions to the world of software are among the best out there... QEMU, FFMPEG, LZEXE....

His hack generating DVB-T signal by driving a VGA card is among the best out there. I think it's a bit shameful his skills are not well known out there.

Yes! Fabrice is the epitome of a hacker (as you mention driving a VGA card to generate a DVB-T signal).

He is super prolific and extremely talented, but I wonder about the quality of the code as well. ffmpeg security issues comes to mind.

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...

U forgot LZexe

I wonder if there's ever gonna be a day when we'll see Vista running in the browser.

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