Windows93 | Hacker News Reader

Windows93

windows93.net

630 pointspiqufoh232 comments

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...

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.

> nothing ever animated like this either

There were add-ons that added animated tricks to the window manager even back in the Win3.1 days. Nothing like you get with more modern GPU-based compositing techniques as everything had to be done in software and CPUs were not all that fast, but you could get animated icons, windows that slid or faded into view, and other such.

It was slow and jerky, even on what was high-end kit at the time, but that didn't stop people playing.

Running such software was a first class way to bring on a blue-screen, or in "standard mode" just hang everything, of course!

My brother could crash Windows 3.1 in Standard Mode just by mashing the keyboard in some particular way that I could never reproduce. Never took more than 10-15s of elbows on keys before we got a BSOD on an otherwise stable machine.

A few years ago I let my young son examine a keyboard connected to a Linux computer with a locked screen and in a few seconds he showed me my first kernel panic. I never figured out how he did it.

probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

Completely unrelated, but you just brought back some wonderful memories of the elementary school computer lab when all the students would mash the shift key when they wanted help, so when the whole class got stuck, there would be a chorus of motherboard buzzers. Good times.

"nothing ever animated like this"

Active Desktop...

I had one of those were almost every single icon on the desktop was animated, even "My Computer".

Active Desktop was just a HTML desktop (it didn't animate the window forms) and it part of Internet Explorer 4 so quiet late into the life of Windows 95. Probably around 1997 if I had to guess. There certainly wasn't anything like that on Windows 3.x which is what people would have been using in 1993.

It did not make win32 windows animate when they opened or closed.

Edit: multiple people mentioned windowblinds. I used it too in the late 90s. My point stands.

There were third party addons that did some pretty crazy things. I don't know if animations were among them, but I do remember at least one that would completely retheme windows with different shapes and layouts, Windowblinds I think it was called.

Thanks for refreshing my memory. Those were pretty cool programs back then.

I definetly remember Windowsblinds too (and geez, it seems they're still around ...).

I was into LiteStep, which basically was a shell replacement for explorer.exe.

I'm also reminded how trivially easy it was to configure Win9x to use a different shell: you'd just edit system.ini under [boot] to say shell=litestep.exe and you were done.

Here are some screenshots:

[0] https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-aug00g.jpg

[1] http://litestep.net/snapshot1.png

> I'm also reminded how trivially easy it was to configure Win9x to use a different shell: you'd just edit system.ini under [boot] to say shell=litestep.exe and you were done.

Fun fact, Win98 still had progman.exe installed (from win 3.1 and earlier). I had to switch to it in system.ini one day when something in explorer got corrupted and the normal UI wouldn't load.

You could do that trick even in windows 3.11. I remember using central point desktop for a while: 3d look, virtual desktops, advanced file manager and a bunch of other goodies in the 3.x era.

http://toastytech.com/guis/cpdesk.html

It was bloated and unstable though, so I was glad to upgrade to windows 95.

Litestep was fun, especially for those of us that couldn't get away with installing Linux on the family computer.

I also used eFX, which was a free Windowblinds competitor that made it super easy to make skins, and released a ton of garish and ugly ones back in the day.

Holy shit, Litestep! That takes me back.

yup! I used it until Windows XP, before Vista made it kind of pointless.

Window Blinds did that and way more on Windows 98 and it was fairly popular.

Many free other apps existed that did similar things too.

Active Desktop was the first thing I disabled whenever I installed Win98 on a new machine.

The nice thing about running Linux is that my FVWM config looks pretty much the same now as it did in 1995, bitmapped fonts and all. Can't improve on perfection.

In the 90s I used FVWM on Red Hat v1 and it was confusing to me. It's like looking at your desktop through high-powered binoculars from two feet away.

It was a very configurable window manager, so I am sure with some study you could have adjusted the distance of the binoculars.

I think he run it under a VirtualDeskop mode, where its physical screen would be smaller than the X11 video mode, thus, having to scroll up and down to show the full Fvwm Pages.

Thanks, I had forgotten that mode, but I remember it now.

In those days as I recall setting X to work at a good resolution was sometimes much more painful than it had to be. Since the 2000s (after the fork to Xorg for example) autoconfig got a lot better. I seem to recall it was possible to trigger a config that would give you a very low physical resolution but high res virtual desktop.

I recently started using fvwm again on one machine in some kind of exercise in nostalgia. Holds up surprisingly well.

Uh, not in 93, but around 98/2000 definitely it looked like this. Well, without the animated windows effects. (I’m looking at v1 only, on mobile at the moment)

You’re right about 93, but if you go about five years later and keep all the animations turned on, it looked a lot like this. Those animations killed performance so I suspect that most people on here turned them off as quickly as I did, but this is a pretty good reproduction. It’s good enough that as I poke around, I remember specific events from my relative youth...

Animated windows weren't a thing even in the late 90s. That required a compositing window manager. Linux was one of the first platforms to get them and Compiz wasn't even released until the mid 00s. Vista was the first MS operating system to properly support compositing (though XP -- and 2000 via undocumented APIs -- did support transparency effects).

Animated icons have never existed aside from hacks like Active Desktop or active running programs in system tray / taskbar (again, using hacks where the icon was changed every second).

I had an Amiga with various hacks that animated windows. They don't require a compositing WM, although they're much easier to implement with one.

There were things that people called animated windows and animated icons at the time, but the meaning was quite different from what we think about today. For example: an animated window was an animation effect on the frame when a window was opened or closed, while an animated icon could be showing one icon for a closed folder and another icon for an open folder. (These recollections are from 1995 era OS/2. Windows had it's own stuff going on, but I pretty much ignored it from the introduction of Windows 95 until late Windows XP.)

That's not what "Windows 93" (the site posted) is doing though. However I do take your point about the window borders, I had forgotten that was referred to as "window animations".

I don't agree with your icon point though. I don't recall anyone calling those boolean icon states as "animated".

I'm pretty sure the API that changed the window transparency was documented in 2K, because I distinctly remember reading how to do it on MSDN after first seeing one of those in an app.

It was documented in Windows XP but I think it was Vista that really promoted the use of that effect ("Aero" was it?). Happy to be proved wrong about Windows 2000 but I don't recall seeing any documentation on MSDN back when I was playing around with Windows APIs.

I remember I pinched the API guide for XP thinking "if it works in XP then it must work in Windows 2000" and the reason I remember that so vividly was because it didn't work properly. In fact it caused a kernel panic. Which was pretty much the only time I managed to upset Windows 2000 badly enough to cause a "blue screen of death".

It definitely worked in 2K - there were many apps that implemented it as a bling feature as soon as it became known. The question is whether it was documented at the time.

If you were able to build it for Win2K, and it compiled successfully, then it was supported - it wouldn't be in the headers otherwise. Even if you build it with XP as a target, and then run on 2K, you'd get a regular Win32 error about not being able to resolve a symbol from a DLL. Getting a BSOD indicates a driver issue.

MSDN also says that it is supported for Win2K+: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/n...

Aero in Vista was something else - it was the first version of Windows that did whole desktop composition, and so it could do all kinds of fancy stuff, similar to Compiz that preceded it on Linux. Transparent windows in 2K/XP used per-window composition.

It worked in 2k... used a customized litestep (iirc) theme with win2k for a long time. Definitely made use of the transparency bits.

Did that use Microsoft API though? It might have been possible to hack your own library to do the same thing as I'm pretty sure there were are Win32 APIs to read and write pixels outside of your form -- albeit performance almost certainly wouldn't be on a par doing it that way.

(I say "pretty sure" because I once wrong a program to create a second mouse cursor but which was controlled via a game controller. The logic being I could multi-task my GUI operations. Obviously the logic was flawed and that application proved dumb but it was a fun development exercise none-the-less. Anyhow, I think I drew the cursor directly to screen by reading and writing pixels using some Win32 API; but I'm not super confident of that memory).

My comment is now too old to edit but another poster has provided some good insight

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480864

I'm not entirely sure... I know it worked in 2K, but didn't work for Win9x line, so I'm pretty sure it was in 2K/NT APIs, and not the 3.x/9x/me line. I don't think it was used by any of MS's internal themes until XP though.

I think it worked in 2K

You are wrong. Xrender could do half of the effects.

Which bit is wrong?

- Xrender wasn't released in the 90s,

- isn't window manager (ie a compositing window manager could use Xrender for compositing (like KWin supports when OpenGL isn't available) but Xrender itself isn't a WM)

- and isn't even available on Windows (which was the OS we were talking about)

I think perhaps you might have misunderstood me? (it wasn't my clearest written post).

We are talking about how the composite extension for X was a must for FX, I said bullshit because I had these effects long before the X entension and Compiz.

And I know XRender is not a WM, FFS, my first distro was Debian Woody so I know my shit better than those Compiz bling-bling new users.

And not only KWIN did that, a lot of WM's did different FX in software by either using XRender or custom coding (such as Afterstep).

> We are talking about how the composite extension for X was a must for FX

1. No. I was talking about Windows. Compiz was mentioned as a comparison to give an idea of time lines. You then decided to interpret my entire post to mean something quite different.

2. The comment about compositing was window managers, not X. Xrender, in this context, would be equivalent to OpenGL (albeit one uses hardware frame buffers et al and the other uses software).

3. Even in your Xrender point, the window animations in Linux would still have to be done via a compositing window manager such as Kwin -- which supports both Xrander and OpenGL libraries.

3 (i). ...or if not a compositing WM, an entirely separate display manager replacing X. Though even there, you'd likely still want to go down the compositing route because it's much easier.

> And I know XRender is not a WM, FFS, my first distro was Debian Woody so I know my shit better than those Compiz bling-bling new users.

1. Then why are you flipflopping between different stacks of libraries as if they're one and the same?

2. The length of time you've been using Linux isn't a useful yardstick for how much more you might know stuff

2 (i). Furthermore, HN is a technical crowd so I'm sure most on here have been using Linux at least that long. I've been running Slackware since the 90s and I know from previous conversations I'm far from a unique case. So I'd be careful about assuming your audience when commenting on here.

2 (ii). It's also worth noting that almost no new users would be using Compiz these days anyway. There's just no need when most of the popular desktop environments ship their own compositing WMs. Plus the novelty factor just isn't there now like it was back in 00s.

3. Also please tone down your language. There's no need to be rude.

> And not only KWIN did that, a lot of WM's did different FX in software by either using XRender or custom coding (such as Afterstep).

1. Nobody said compositing had to happen in hardware.

2. "FX" like menu transparencies (as you mentioned elsewhere) isn't even remotely the same as the window animations originally being discussed and being demonstrated in the Windows 93 demo linked to; and for a multitude of reasons:

2 (i) For starters you're overlaying within the same window. Things used to get trickier when you needed "FX" to interact with parts outside of your form (worse still, other applications too).

2 (ii) Transparency also wasn't computationally expensive to do in software compared to the kind of transformations that Compiz did -- and that the Windows 93 demo does. The Compiz/93 style animations simply wouldn't have been practical for general purpose computing without hardware graphics libraries (bare in mind the specifications of the average computer in the 90s and early 00s).

2 (iii) ...and I know this from experience because I used to write graphical shells for both Windows and Linux in the late 90s and early 00s.

>wouldn't have been practical for general purpose computing without hardware graphics

Or just VESA and Windows' optimized 2D libraries. GDI is a good example. Most 2D FXs don't require a hard computation. Seriously, Enlightenment did those in software.

You underestimate what could've done in software in the 90's, especially when memory protection under w9x was nil and everything was much more low level.

Insecure? A lot. Would it work? Yes.

Windows 98 could do these with 3rd party software.

>Slackware in late 90's

Debian Woody was almost like late 90's for obvious reasons. It shipped a 2.2 kernel with 2.4 being the optional and bleeding edge one.

> Or just VESA and Windows' optimized 2D libraries. GDI is a good example.

From what I remember of GDI (and admittedly it's been a while since I've done graphics development on Windows) GDI wasn't designed for real time animations. It was more designed for static (or at least semi-static) scenes like image editing. Real time transformations is a whole different ball game.

Either way, GDI certainly wasn't optimised. If you wanted optimised then you'd have used DirectDraw (which doesn't exist now but back then it was a thing).

> Most 2D FXs don't require a hard computation.

But we're not talking about "fx" as you keep calling it, we're talking about real time transformations interacting with multiple different canvases (to borrow a term from web development). Wobbly windows is a whole different ball game to transparent forms. Then you need to factor in that those transformations need to happen without slowing desktop performance.

Windows 9x used to do really basic "animations" which required no transformation effects and even that used to get turned off by a great many people on modest hardware because of the impact it had on performance.

You're just not being realistic about either the transformation effects in question (repeatedly moving the goal posts to basic translucency on stationary forms) nor the hardware of the era in question.

> Seriously, Enlightenment did those in software.

Enlightenment is a seriously cool piece of engineering but it didn't do compositing until E16. And it wasn't even the early versions of E16 either. So we're not talking late 90s / early 00s there either.

Also did Enlightenment really do that in software or are you just assuming it did?

> You underestimate what could've done in software in the 90's, especially when memory protection under w9x was nil and everything was much more low level.

Graphics development was not more low level. The opposite was actually the problem: Windows APIs lacked direct hardware access the early part of the 9x life time. In fact literally the entire point of GDI was to offer an approximation of what could be done with direct hardware access but without giving Windows developers low level APIs. The obvious side-effect of that is a massive performance hit. There was a reason DirectDraw was so sorely needed and a reason why a great many games developers still favoured DOS for the early part of 9x's life.

> Windows 98 could do these with 3rd party software.

But it didn't do real time transformation effects and that 3rd party software often ran like a sack of shit on peoples systems. Usually the people you saw who ran it well were gamers on high end systems.

> Debian Woody was almost like late 90's for obvious reasons.

No it wasn't. It was released in 2002[1]. The testing repo for woody wasn't even created until mid December 2000[2] (so basically 2001).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history#Debian_...

[2] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-detail...

Is this what Enlightenment used to achieve that?

Maybe. KDE menu transparencies used that. I think some terminals with true transparency used XRender, too.

Windows 93 is what became Windows 95.

To counter the downvotes from people who are certain there was no “Win93”, here are two internal MSFT emails referring to the same, in clear reference to what ended up being Win95.

http://www.windowswiki.info/wp-content/uploads/codenames/PX0...

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.

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

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.

You wouldn't have. It was still being called "Windows 4.0" until very close to its release in 1995.

I remember people talking about Windows 97 before 1998 rolled around.

Source?

I thought they had some design ideas in a later cancelled OS called Cairo, then they had a release codenamed Chicago which ported some ideas but dramatically scaled back, and that was Win95.

At the time there were two branches, the win 3.1 branch, which was consumery, and the NT branch which was for servers / developers, etc. Cairo was an OS based on the NT branch, which was ultimately cancelled. Chicago was the project name for win95, which came off the 3.1 branch. Eventually the NT/3.1 branches merged, in the release called XP. And yeah, there's no such thing as windows 93.

Source: worked at msft from 92-97.

But I thought the Chicago UI was also present in some form in cairo, and that is where some of it originated. Is that true?

I know the history of NT based windows much better, I was at MS later, and in Windows.

There may have been some overlap, but as I remember it the main thrust of Cairo wasn't really about UI. It was an object based filesystem, and some other fancy shit going on under the covers. (I was on Apps, and we never targetted Cairo, never got a chance to play with it directly, but I saw it demoed a few times, and I remember the UI looking more like NT/3.11. Could easily be misremembering that part though)

EDIT: Yeah, you're right, there was some UI that made it to 95. From wikipedia:

"The Windows 95 user interface was based on the initial design work that was done on the Cairo user interface."

Wow, never thought of 98/98SE as 4.x point releases, or Me as 5.0, or XP Home and Pro as descendant SKUs for 3.1 and NT 3.1.

Windows Me was still in 95/98 development line and is internally versioned as 4.2. 2000 and XP were 5.x, Vista was 6.0, Windows 7 was 6.1, Windows 8 was 6.2, and Windows 10 probably would have been internally 7.0 if they hadn't bumped the internal number forward to match.

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

Heh, yeah, I remember when they switched to labelling everything by year. Those of us on the development teams thought that was seriously tempting fate given our track record of routinely shipping things a year late.

to that point, wasn't 95 actually released in '96?

I was like 13 but thats what I remember...

Heh, no, but it was a close call. Shipped in August of 95. I was working on Office "95" at the time, and we were seriously under the gun, for a few reasons. Firstly, it came down from on high that all Office apps needed to be ported to 32-bit, as opposed to running in Win95's 16 bit subsystem (this was a massive job, and introduced numerous bugs). And to make matters worse, this was a time when software was delivered in boxes, which contained CDRoms, or 3.25" floppies, as the customer desired. Win95 had completely reserved all of msft's manufacturing capacity for like 6-7 weeks, so in order to ship in 95, we had to ship like 2 months earlier than a normal release.

3.5" or 5.25" :)

Actually, 90mm.

* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/floppy-discs-are-90mm-not-3-and-a-half-...

that's right. 3.5... 5.25 was long past.

This is my favourite part about my 3 year old. I love when he combines his imagination with his ability to have unwavering opinions on things.

Recently: a conversation in which he insisted that no, that person isn't my dad, it's his grandpa. But I have a dad too. No, you're my dad. That's grandpa. etc.

Also I'm apparently five years old which is very old. Mom got off easy. She's four.

You say that you have a dog? Yes, a villain of a one, said Clesippus. And he has puppies? Yes,and they are very like himself. And the dog is the father of them? Yes, he said, I certainly saw him and the mother of the puppies come together. And is he not yours? To be sure he is. Then he is a father, and he is yours; ergo, he is your father, and the puppies are your brothers.

I took my 3 year old to a local wilderness park.

After, we talked the animals, and he confidently told me that he "was almost eaten by a bear."

I love this comment - it describes so much of my child and reminds me so much of her, right down to her confidence about her grandparents’ ages.

She’s a little older so she knows some pretty big numbers. I’m 20, her granny and grandpa are 20 and she’s either 4 or if she wants to be the boss she’s ‘10 hundred’. :)

But you’re 5. That’s really old...

Undeniably interesting to witness how the yours/mine infrastructure hasn't come online yet.

Last Friday, at my parents house, I showed my four year old an album of me as baby, when she failed to guess who's in the pictures and was told it's me, her face was at first sheer horror, then total disbelief.

One of my kids asked me, when he was 4, if the negative numbers go on forever. To this day, almost 20 years later, that still blows my mind.

And no, he's not a math whiz. None of my kids are. That was disappointing. But he's a whiz at plenty of other things.

He'll probably think Hilbert's Hotel is pretty fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faQBrAQ87l4

What does "telling stories" mean in this context? It actually sounds like a pretty good description of HN to me …. (EDIT: Oh, I guess it means lying.)

I’m very sorry. My child has a wonderful imagination and loves to tell stories. Sometimes the stories happened (they are true) and sometimes they didn’t really happen (they are stories). In our family, we have telling truths (these are things she saw and that I can ask other adults about) and telling stories (these are things that she didn’t see with her eyes). We don’t have a concept of lying yet, but that will likely come this year. For now, ‘telling stories’ fills the role of lying.

Do you read books to your child ?

I can remember stuff from quite a young age, I think that one thing I took from getting books read to me was that inventing worlds and setting stories in those worlds was just something that everyone did.

We read almost constantly and she has been surrounded with books since she was an infant. Now that she’s a little bit older, she ‘reads’ and I read to her. At bedtime, she’ll often ‘read’ a book with a lot of pictures, then I’ll read it back to her and then we’ll switch to a book with fewer pictures and I’ll read it to her until she goes to sleep.

Do you have any book recommendations? I’m always looking to add to the library! :)

Any libraries near you?

Our system (king county library system) is top notch, and their children section is organized with books specific to children development: life events, feelings, bedtime, concepts, etc.

Every two weeks I go and pick out new books, rotating topics.

We live two blocks from a library and she goes regularly. It’s great on weekends (especially during the winter) - it’s full of kids and it’s a lot of fun.

I like asking people for book, television or even website suggestions. We’ve found some unbelievable gems that way, including a site she uses to ‘wave to the International Space Station.’ :)

No need to be sorry! I wasn't being snarky; I genuinely didn't understand at first.

I guess it's more the fanciful sort of talking about things that don't actually exist like a book does, versus the impact intent to deceive that goes with lying.

That’s a perfect description. She’s a kind, innocent little person with a big heart and a big imagination. Sometimes the line between imagination and fact is a little fuzzy, but I don’t think it has the intent of a lie. They’re just stories...

Ha that line is really blurry sometimes. I told my kid that I fly to work, thinking he'd do that sideways glance nose-scrunch thing and realise it was a fictional story quite easily: instead he got worried that I shouldn't fly too high.

I suggested I could tunnel like a mole instead, but apparently that's ridiculous!

It's cute when kids with their not-yet-developed brains to it, but when adults do it pathological lying, narcissism, psychopathy, or various other personality disorders.

This is a good point and it’s one that I try to be mindful of. At this point, it’s age appropriate but at some point we’ll start talking about consequences, truth and lies.

The strangest part of parenting is how quickly time flies. A little over four years ago, I sent my parents pictures from the first ultrasound. Today, the baby in the ultrasound is sitting here, eating an orange and watching My Little Pony. It’s been years, but it feels like minutes...

It’s wonderful but it goes by too fast and there’s a heck of a lot of responsibility crammed into a short number of years.

Ah, but which pony is best pony? ;)

I’ve been watching a lot of My Little Pony so this could get heated...:)

I think it means fiction, which is distinct from lying.

At 4 years old they're not able to understand how much world there is outside their own.

Yes but their imagination knows no boundaries. Later on they get it but so does their imagination diminish.

I'm quite unconvinced by that. This might be true, but most of "kid imagination" I've seen or heard of was mashing up things they've had some experience with ("the dinosaur fights the action man", "my uncle can teleport"...). They don't seem to be able to think in the abstract, or even think outside any box (such as imagining that somebody could be more than 10yo! What would a 1000yo, 10000yo be like? An adult would have much much more imagination).

We find them funny and weird because they take mash up things we got bored or familiar with (dinosaurs, age), so they shake up our world a bit. But imaginative? Some adults are terrible at imagination, but many are amazing

Agreed. I keep coming back to a comic by Boulet which you might enjoy: http://english.bouletcorp.com/2007/12/11/fuck-peter-pan/

Part 2: http://english.bouletcorp.com/2008/06/19/fuck-peter-pan-part...

Haha Boulet is great, I forgot about this particular comic, thanks! Exact explanation of what I mean

haha this made my day! thanks man :')

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

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/

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.

Damn I remember that one from way back, blew me away back then too. Functionality wise it's so faithful but with it's own twist on the aesthetic.

Ubuntu had a really cool demo for Unity on their site a while back (announcement [0]). It's been retired but the code is on Github [1]

[0] https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-online-tour

[1] https://github.com/canonical-webteam-archive/tour.ubuntu.com

Excellent list. You have any favorites?

I would say Ash Kyd [1], Mariano Pascual [2] and Jack Kim [3]

[1] https://ash.ms [2] http://www.marianopascual.me [3] https://www.jackk.im

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.

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...

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.)

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

You can have it in your terminal too:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

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

There is even more. There is a selection of old Amiga demos that run in an emulator! Whoever made this stuff is a genius for putting this sprawling thing together.

Not a proper BSOD but there's an evocation. Have you tried "crazy" in the Terminal? You'll go for a 3 min ride of music with funky animation starting with a BSOD sprite. (It's probably the same as Start > Programs > crazy but as much as I liked it, I won't run it twice.)

I clicked Corglitch and my Firefox became completely unresponsive. Somewhat close, I would say.

I managed to do that too (browser freezing until I closed the tab, also in Firefox) but there's supposed to be a proper BSoD. I found a screenshot of it:

https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/windows_9...

(It's a stylized "Error 404: The page is missing or was never written. You can see if it becomes available again.")

Found it! Open "/c/files/documents/keynotes/opening/" file and keep clicking on the next button (the triangle) until you reach the last page with "Windows 93. Are you ready?" text. Click on "Are you ready?"

Great job. Got it! And the presentation that leads to it is hilarious in itself.

How did you find it?

I wish I could say there was some complex forensics involved, but the truth is I just stumbled upon it when exploring the files on the disk.

I wonder what "global thermonuclear war" in the terminal does. It probably starts a game of Hangman or something. It would be ironic if it were a double-bluff, though.

It's tic-tac-toe but with a reference that's obscure to me ("Greetings, Professor Falken").

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

Classic 80s cyberthriller.

Thank you!

Relevant clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXzNo0vR_dU

These are both references to the movie War Games (1983), which is excellent.

Thank you!

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.

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.

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.

My 386 PS/2 Model 70 had 2 MB and ran 16 MHz. I copied Windows 3.0 from a school computer, using the arj file compressor, to a bunch of diskettes and then to this computer. Started no problem when I typed "win" on the DOS prompt.

Long after I had switched to Linux, I helped my grandmother with Windows 95 on a 486 DX4 at 100MHz. I had completely forgotten how snappy a UI could be on modest hardware.

Also KDE2 was indeed perfect. They had built all the features one needs in a desktop, and ever since everything has been half baked.

I liked KDE 3.5 as it had everything in it (Konqueror was useful with the protocols for SSH file transfer etc., it really did everything) but the KDE2 with the purpley CDE look was great.

Not so keen on modern Linux UIs. They seem to be copying macos (not a bad thing) but I am using LXDE or XFCE these days.

I remember Windows 95 being fast and able to keep up with keyboard shortcuts that you typed in a flurry. The modern systems can't. And in Windows 10, half of the metro apps and settings apps don't even have keyboard shortcuts. It's step back IMHO, and indicates that they were "designed" by users who only use the mouse.

8 megs and constantly swapping out virtual memory.

That was a popular expansion of the EMACS acronym. Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping. Coincidence, or were you referring to that?

Coincidence. Windows 95 really hit virtual memory at 8 megs or lower and constantly swapped out RAM.

Well, with a bit of effort you could make FVWM look like this:

http://ironphoenix.org/fvwm/configs/fvwm-desktop/fvwm-deskto...

Best of two words, and it could run fast enough even under a 486.

+1 for KDE2 love

previous hits from past 1-5 years

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691597

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14531578

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9162566

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8507786

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.

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.

Last one (from GPs list) was from 2017. I wouldn't call this a blatant repost by any means. And there are some good conversations going on too, so there's value in that.

My point: don't sweat it, it was good that you posted this.

Don't worry about it - it wasn't posted too recently so the rules haven't been dented, and it's amusing.

Reposts are ok after a year or so. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

Well, I didn't see it then, and well, glad to see it now.

It's a classic link worth sharing again. People more often need to be reminded of the classics than shown something new

wasn't calling foul (Despite it being very old) more sharing some previous hits for the extra commentary

Which is appreciated. Surprised there isn't a bot/autopost with past times a story was discussed. @dang, pull your finger out! ;o)

There is "past" link between "hide" and "web" in the subtext thingy

Yeah, that functionality, and the presence of dupe detection when posting, is what makes it a surprise to me that when they let a "dupe" through that they don't use the existing functions to just list the past stories.

I post links to previous threads a lot, and find that there's enough judgment required to do it properly that I'm skeptical about automating it. Maybe I'll get over that, because doing it manually is a pain.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

So it seems to be able to open itself quite well: https://imgur.com/a/dkEYrFW

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.

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 ?

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?

> Why can't modern SPAs work as well

Some do

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.

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

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

ITYM Hampsterdance.

My vapors are waved.

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

Search for Fabrice Bellard.

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

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

"Safari is teh new Internet Explorer"

huh

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not to mention energy conscious for when you're not attached to the grid.

Especially since that’s chrome...

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..

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

Dr. Marburg is there for a reason.

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.

Text rendering seems off. Some are clear but some are very blurry: https://i.imgur.com/G2lyFEY.png

Is this intentional or just a bug?

I do not know, but I have another font problem https://i.imgur.com/VwMWcOm.png

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

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

This version of Minesweeper seems a bit hard to beat.

Play around in the options to get the vanilla minesweeper.

Disable "Troll mode" in "Options".

One of my favorite pieces of software art! Jankenpopp and Zombectro are awesome artists... http://jankenpopp.com/ http://zombect.ro/

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

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

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

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

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.

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...

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

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.

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

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

In the options there is a "troll mode" you can turn off, if you actually want to play

SkiFree will show a pop-up saying the program is not responding, and after you close it, show another one...

I think it's a reference to the Bad Luck Brian meme.

Did you try every other space 30 times in a row?

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.

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.

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

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

Half-Life 3....confirmed

That one cracked me and my boy. Awesome.

Progress Quest is a surprisingly engaging game

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

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

Very cool. Technology has come far.

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

It's not just you. The original minesweeper generates mines after your first click so it can ensure you will not lose on the first click. This version seems to instead make sure a mine is always under your cursor after the first click. I love it.

I managed to beat it on intermediate.

How?

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

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

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

They have been able to do it for the past 15 years! I remember I had a bunch of emulators that were running in Applet and Flash to play games on a school computer using a browser. I guess emulators in JS are more recent, but I have no doubt a Game Boy one would have run a decade ago at least.

In the Trollbox chat log I see

>~anonymous is now known as wuhan-clan

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

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

Can confirm, I got lost: https://myspace.windows93.net/?id=244

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

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

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

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

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

I had Delphi then

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

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

The trollbox is probably the scariest part.

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

And extremely NSFW/NSFL when I visited.

Oops, lenna.png is definitely NSFW.

OS in a browser, and its snappy.

Doom works!

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

Lotta memories here. Thanks.

So good, so very very good!

Defrag works as expected.

always upvote windows93

Half life 3 confirmed windows 93 exclusive

I like the Half-life 3

This is so superbad

Good old days :D

Reply on news.ycombinator.com