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Comment by fsiefken | Hacker News Reader

You say the gap between Win3.1 and Win95 is insane. I don't agree with that. Before I was able to run Win95 I used Calmira with Windows 3.11 - it provided a nice Wind95 like taskbar. There was also win32s to run most 32bit applications. Yes the multitasking was better on Win95, in Win3.11 I had to wait until a floppy disk was formatted before I could do something else. I totally agree I feel at home with the 98 classic and XP classic UI's. It's a pitty I can't run modern browsers and java on XP, otherwise I'd be tempted to use it. There are some themes for Linux though, perhaps the Xplorer2 runs under wine. I could use ReactOS as well.

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I recently revived an old laptop that was sold for scrap, it was fully working... just missing a power adapter.

Dos 6.22 and Win3.11.

Much more usable than I remembered. Was kinda sorta able to get online with a PCMCIA Ethernet card.

Aside from the whole, well... lack of HTTPS support in any browser you could possibly use on that OS. Also in Win95. And Win98. But regardless...

The UI was very straightforward even then. Open folder. Click icon to run app. It wasn't hard to use. Like you say, the bigger issue was the amount of power we had under the hood. Task switching wasn't perfect but it didn't exactly hurt us then, either.

I realised that for as long as I have had a Windows system (all the way up through to my Win10 box though I now prefer xUbuntu)... I always did something that is kind of a holdover from my days of using Win3.0... Instead of using the start menu, I put shortcuts to all of my mostl commonly used apps in a folder called 'Proggy Bin' on the desktop so I can alt-tab to it when I needed to instead of dragging my mouse to the corner. So, in some ways, the old Win3.x UI was more productive in my workflow.

There’s been some projects that try to get the new internet working on old computers. One off the top of my head:

https://github.com/atauenis/webone

Also saw one recently that proxies to archive.org for that really nostalgic feel.

> Aside from the whole, well... lack of HTTPS support in any browser you could possibly use on that OS. Also in Win95. And Win98. But regardless...

Use a proxy running on your LAN.

The proxy connects to the site over modern HTTPS (i.e. TLS 1.2 or whatever) and you connect to the proxy over plain HTTP, or whatever old version of HTTPS your client supports (NT4 sp6 with IE6 supports TLS1.0 or SSL3, as the latest, dunno about win 98), if you make sure to trust its cert.

Install wsgopher and head to:

    gopher://sdf.org
    gopher://hngopher.com
    gopher://magical.fish
    gopher://bitreich.org

Wsgopher it's out there, search for in under old win 3.1 software archives, where are several.

Stuff for Win 3.11. In the Net subdir you have both Gopher and Netscale as clients.

gopher://i-logout.cz/1/software/PC/Software/]

XP and previous versions were susceptible to root kits. Once you had one the the OS was toast. Removing them and mitigating the impact used to be a prolific business. At the end it was so bad that companies were forced to migrate to Windows 7. Windows 7 introduced a protection feature that somewhat randomized the once predictable memory locations of the kernel drivers. Root kits disappeared as a common occurrence. XP in the hands of a lay user will be trashed almost immediately if exposed to the internet.

Calmira was amazing! It, along with Win32s and the 16-bit version of Internet Explorer, brought a lot of second-hand 386's with 4 Mb RAM into the modern world, by providing working Internet access and32-bit app support and a modern UI.

> Calmira with Windows 3.11

Ah that takes me back, I remember having a computer magazine at the time when Windows 95 was in development (and was just known as Chicago) which came with a bunch of software on the free disk/CD which "emulated" the Win95 look and feel on Win 3.11. Was pretty fun at the time. I guess Calmira might have been one of them!

Yes, at one time it was renamed into Calmira. I think it was written in Delphi, but I'm not sure - it now has LFN support. The nice thing is it can run on a 386 with 4M.. which can easily be emulated on for example DosBox or Qemu. You perhaps could virtualize the whole thing in javascript and run it in a browser like here: https://archive.org/details/win3_stock http://www.calmira.net/

i don't know if you have any particular objections to using Windows 10 as your main operating system, but there's a pretty cool tweak called SimpleClassicTheme which can get you a surprisingly long way in replicating the classic Windows aesthetic in modern Windows:

https://winclassic.boards.net/thread/456/reversibly-enable-d...

XFCE + Classic95 from Github = heaven.

This one?

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Wow. These usually get it just wrong enough that I can't use it, but this is REALLY close! I'm impressed.

IceWM also has a nice Windows 95 theme. I used to run it with Gnome 1.0 on my Red Hat 5.2 system (Linux kernel 2.0.36!) system in 2000.

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