Show HN: Windows 98½ – fake desktop, real Internet

Nice job. I think the OG of Win98 JS recreation from about a decade ago (which even has a working version of Space Cadet in it) is still around as well!

https://github.com/1j01/98

https://98.js.org

One interesting thing about it is that when you navigate to a site in the 98JS copy of IE - it actually serves you an older wayback mirror copy of the original site (try yahoo.com for example).

Link isn't working

I made this as a love letter to my generation - the Xennials. The ones who grew up before the internet but lived to see it rise. The ones who remember rotary phones and the silence before smartphones and screens were everywhere. We are the bridge generation, and we're still here.

This thing is not retro tech fetish. These are the symbols, the graphics, the systems that I grew up with. It's nostalgia, but it's more like a memory of a simpler world—a golden, beautiful time, simple and good.

I always liked these kinds of web desktops, but one thing I always noticed about them was the browsers never work. Everything else works, sometimes amazingly well: Media Player, Minesweeper... but never the browser. That's because it's hard. Iframe restrictions, the modern web, CORS, security headers—they block you at every turn. You can't do anything to embed the modern, open internet inside the modern, open internet.

You can try with an iframe and maybe hack it together with a proxy, but you're usually just left hopscotching across a crippled, sparse version of the internet that's fragile and not like the original. It's never the full web. It's a broken web.

I wanted the open web. Some of you will have no idea what I'm talking about, but I grew up with Phrack magazine, reading RFCs on TCP in high school, Usenet news, and the Temple of the Screaming Electron. This was the digital frontier—a world that wasn't yet fully specced, where information was free and people who were pushing the boundaries were exploring the networks. They weren't breaking any laws that made sense. There were no restrictions on where you could explore.

Just like... parenting was different. In that generation, you could ride your bike through the city for hours. No one knew where you were. The time before helicopter parents. I'm of the generation that remembers that. We had the freedom to connect the dots the way we wanted. And that's what the internet was. That's what it felt like. It was fucking exciting. There were no borders or barriers or boundaries for information. It was so fucking cool.

I wanted to bring that freedom into something real. Here, now. That's one of the things that made me want to make BrowserBox—this way to cross those barriers to some extent, hopefully, securely. But though it became a security product, raw security was never the point of it. It was about making a mashup possible: mixing, crossing those boundaries of information and content. No more silos. No more walled gardens.

I lived in the time before that, and I lived long enough to see those things become the bad that they're said to be now. So here's to the crazy ones. To the ones who remember the way it was, and maybe who remember the kind of future we should build now. That's who I built this for. That's you.

I hope you enjoy it. Have a little fun with this remembering of another time. And maybe, for the ones who have no idea what I'm talking about, this is a little bit of a snapshot of what it was like to connect to the internet in the 1990s. Sound on.

So here's to you, bridge generation. I didn't build this to say, "look back." I built this to express we can still go anywhere. The open web is not dead. It's just waiting for us to build it.