Virtual Computer Museum – VNC into Archaic Windows Systems | Hacker News Reader

Virtual Computer Museum – VNC into Archaic Windows Systems

museum.trialanderror.tech

69 pointsthrowup23843 comments

It's great that someone is trying to preserve these operating systems. However the choice of limiting it to 1 user per OS at a time makes the museum/website unusable. I tried several times over the span of 20 minutes and couldn't get into a single VM.

While it doesn't cover everything, there is no shortage of browser-based emulators that can run most of the software listed.

Windows 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1 https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/

Windows 95: https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox

Windows 98 http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98

Windows 2000 https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...

Windows NT 4.0 https://pixelsuft.github.io/onwin/emulator.html?hda=winnt&cd...

Some of the more esoteric OSes, or the ones which actually need a little bit of horse power to run like Vista, you can easily download from archive.org and run locally.

We actually run a site pretty similar to this in concept, we've got 9 VMs total and you can take 20 second turns controlling them with other users. There's chat, and if someone breaks it, you can start a vote to reset.

https://computernewb.com/collab-vm/

I first became aware of Hacker News thanks to this project. Great project. There is certainly room for improvement, but it works and is fun!

When I hear "Computer Museum," I feel anger, and I realize that I'm not yet over Paul Allen's family dismantling his Living Computer Museum after his death. That place was doing really great work.

Truth be told I had hoped for something a little more archaic than Windows 95.

Shoot, win95 is archaic? when did we get so old? Gimmie some 3.11 for Workgroups.

tada.wav

Long ago, Insignia Solutions (famous for the SoftPC/SoftWindows emulators) had a product called NTrigue which I think later turned into Citrix MetaFrame? Not sure about the lineage. Anyway, it was an early NT terminal server product.

I remember they ran an open-to-the-Internet NT 3.51 server, you could download the ICA Client and connect to it. Imagine leaving a Windows terminal server that wide-open now.

I wonder if you had a say a Windows 98 machine (or a 20+ year old version of Linux, or one of the Unixes) open on the internet now. Are there still bots out there that would find it and exploit it?

...yes.

Did you actually try it?

Open in what way? Have it connected to the internet with a public IP? Files and printer sharing installed? Personal Web Server v1.0 serving a web page online?

Op here...Thank you for all the visits and feedback. Thanks to them I was able to optimize and test the system. I will be documenting more details about the setup and operation in the future if anyone wants to build something like this or is simply interested. At the moment, like every free project, there is a lack of money to make the system faster and more stable. Since 2024-01-11T12:31 in my time zone over 2183 connections have been registered and I am happy that Hacker News is now reporting about it.

here I post some nice trial and error tests from users.

https://firncloud.trialanderror.tech/s/Kwa9WGjc7oLETYm

I think Windows 2000 is the only one I remember fondly.

I think it's a grossly underrated OS.

As good as Windows XP but without the awful garish themes - it had all that made the Windows 98 GIU great but with the stability of Windows NT.

Also, I don't think you needed to activate it and it didn't have much in the way of telemetry. We'll never have a Windows version as great again.

My only computer for a long time was old thinkpad, so I actually ended up skipping over windows XP entirely.

I finally moved on after the first service pack for vista came out (in 2008), which was surprisingly alright in my experience. It ended up being more stable than win2000.

The biggest problem with the older windows is that poorly written drivers (which is most of them) had a tendency to bluescreen the entire system when they fucked up. Newer windows is so much more resistant to that now.

> [Vista] was surprisingly alright in my experience

I never understood the hate for Vista. People were overly complacent and wanted a OS that ran on 128MB of ram like XP did. Vista was not that. When 7 came along, it was pretty much the same core, except now many computers were already Vista-capable.

I was using the Vista Beta of my 2GB-RAM computer for 6 months before release and it was vastly better than XP.

The hate came from it being pre installed on massively underpowered computers. The majority of users came to vista with a new PC and it just ruined the experience.

I still remember trying to troubleshoot a minor issue and it took half a day just because of the performance on this new PC.

Project Mojave was Microsoft’s attempt to correct this issue. It didn’t go well.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ihorvo2tEuA

I don't remember the specifics, but I do remember that Vista broke a ton of drivers I used for industrial equipment. Serial controllers, that kind of stuff.

If I remember right it had something to do with the transition to driver signing beginning around that era.

So, it represented a lot of labor.

>I was using the Vista Beta of my 2GB-RAM computer for 6 months before release and it was vastly better than XP.

you were blessed to have 2gb in 06. a lot of us didn't. [0]

[0]: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/CrYAAOSwpOZgQFm7/s-l1600.jpg

Up to that point, most Windows iterations didn't require (for the time) big upgrades to run fine. Many PCs designed for a given version could run the next, maybe with a little elbow grease, but the bottom line is: the out-of-the-box experience on new AND upgraded PCs was mostly okay.

Then it came Vista. An OS designed for at least 1Gb RAM, preinstalled on machines who stubbornly refused to sell with more than 512Mb (even 384Mb, the horror!) for a looong time. I remember that, at least where I live, RAM prices sky rocketed just months afther Vista came out, because almost all people irremediably needed the upgrade.

It also didn't help that vendors were happy to fill new systems with their auto-installing crapware. While this wasn't Microsoft fault, it certainly helped to cement Vista's reputation as a very heavy-weight OS.

Having said that. I concede the point that Vista was pretty alright, provided your PC had the grunt to run it.

XP had much better compatibility with Windows 95/98 software than 2000, especially games, as far as I remember.

Windows 2000 had a compatibility mode a la XP, but you needed to activate it with a command. No, XP wasn't better, some Direct Draw games just ran under Windows 95, 98, ME or 2000 in compat mode.

Windows Server 2003 had all the XP goodness but without the UI cruft. I ran it as a daily driver for a few years. Until Windows 7 came out it was the best version of Windows. Product activation was its downside.

Windows 2000 was peak-Windows for me, for sure.

Not quite as stable as Windows NT4, but pretty close, and it benefited from added support for USB and other "modern" things.

And compatibility with Windows 95 and MS-DOS.

What compatibility? What are you talking about? Can't even run Doom.

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/3353-cant-get-dooom-to...

You can use, maybe, ReactOS' ntvdm.dll as a replacement.

On W95 compatibility, in lots of older games (specially the Direct Draw ones) ran much better than XP.

No telemetry, no activation, efficient non-garish UI, "NT stability" which was great for the time. Yeah, we'll never be able to get that back. I have Windows 11 on my gaming PC and it is... sheeesh.

I was happy with it before I got pwned by Nimda. I think it was the only time I got infected by a virus (at least knowingly) in my entire life. I did work supporting 2k servers and workstations in my first jobs but I was already a Linuxhead by then.

Windows 7 was also pretty decent, and managed to somewhat redeem the horror that was Vista.

Windows 7 was a beautiful operating system. It completely redeemed the absolute "horror that was Vista" for a lot of people.

I enjoyed using Windows 7 a lot. It was stable; much more so than previous versions and actually later versions - an update wasn't likely to break support for any devices or introduce a regression like it sometimes does on 10/11.

KDE 5 gives me a similar feeling to what I had with Windows 7. It's very customisable, and indeed with some theming you can make it look almost identical to Windows 7. But what is particularly nice is not so much the aesthetics, but rather the depth of functionality and polish that KDE has. There are hardly any rough edges, and features like KDE Connect are conceptually simple but mind-blowingly efficient in practice.

Just bought a T43 to run Windows 2000 this week. Just got wifi working with WPA2, so I just need some decent browser and some apps next.

Retrozilla.

Thanks for the tip.

Install Extended Kernel patch and you can use MyPal (a fork of Firefox v68 that can run on WinXP).

I want to go vanilla, but thanks!

Interesting choice of tech stack – we're RDPing into a Win 8+ Windows session that, in turn, seems to be either using RDP or VNC to connect to virtual sessions. I imagine that, if we were creating something like this today, we'd just emulate in the browser with a streaming disk!

> I imagine that, if we were creating something like this today, we'd just emulate in the browser with a streaming disk!

Kind of like what https://infinitemac.org/ does for Apple systems?

Where's Microsoft BOB!?

comming soon :D

Seems to be down for me. Anyone else?

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