Windows 95 is now an app you can download and install on macOS Windows and Linux

theverge.com

14 points·rusk··8 comments

>The app its [sic] only 129MB in size and you can download it over at Github for both macOS and Windows. Once it’s running it surprisingly only takes up around 200MB of RAM, even when running all of the old Windows 95 system utilities, apps, and games.

Only to give some perspective, the original requirements for Windows 95 were:

1) 4MB of memory (8MB recommended)

2) 50-70 MB space on hard disk

so IMHO the "surprisingly only takes" comment is surprising.

Previous "Show HN" from the Author:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17827797

I ran Windows 95 under 8MB and let me tell you, that was far from sufficient! There was a RAM shortage back in those days so getting the second 8MB SIMM was a fairly expensive proposition for a teenager. Also on a 85Mb hard drive too don’t get me started ...

Sure, you take the "recommended" (which is usually double the minimum) and at least double it to have a minimally running system and quadruple it too have it running decently, this is "standard Microsoft".

Surprising to me but that's because it's written in Electron which is a notorious memory hog.

This Electron app is based on https://github.com/copy/v86/ ("x86 virtualization in JavaScript, running in your browser and NodeJS")

And yes, it's as slow as it sounds

Don't I need any Win95 license to run it?

Officially (perhaps even morally) yes. Practically no.

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