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Comment by aasasd | Hacker News Reader

For some reason I keep seeing people on HN showing their sites that recreate desktop environments—almost always in the style of Windows, and frequently in the 90s ‘concrete slabs’ look.

It's gonna be hard to beat https://www.windows93.net, though.

P.S. BTW, using PCjs one can actually run Windows 1 to 95 in the browser (and a bunch of other OSes). Alternatively, there's Dosbox—which Archive.org uses for emulation in the browser, and which likewise can run some versions of Windows. So one could really make their site as proper files in the virtual computer, though loading is gonna be a bit rough.

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Agreed that Windows 93 is a hard one to beat. My plan is to try and beat them all eventually, but I am patient and enjoy making the app. I've had this idea for quite a while but only in the last few years felt confident enough in my skills to attempt it.

As for more sites recreating the web desktop idea, here is a great list:

https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-web-desktops

> My plan is to try and beat them all eventually, but I am patient and enjoy making the app.

Patience (and slight obsession) is a superpower.

10 years ago i did this classic-mac-a-like. But actually... I sorta liked most of the Win98 UI. Sure, there were weird corners like trying to confuse printers and control panels as files, but it was the beginning if msft paying attention to UX concepts an A11Y.

Call me a weirdo, but I thought the color-reduxed / high-contrast theme for Win2k was the apex of MSFT UIs.

https://github.com/OhMeadhbh/disco

I've just tried to play minesweeper on this windows93 and it is very hard to say the least...

It has two modes, you just have to figure out how to change modes :)

Ya yes minesweeper is a good one. I'll need to add this too. The Windows 93 was quite hardcore as he made a lot of those games himself.

I actually have v86 on my system which can also run things like PCjs. And I have jsdos which uses dosbox to play DOS. I also have BoxedWine for running 16/32-bit apps.

nice one. Went there, opened chrome. Checked IP. The links are purple. It turns out I am not the first one LOL

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