1996 chat room simulator connected to Win95 and System 7 web desktops | Hacker News Reader

1996 chat room simulator connected to Win95 and System 7 web desktops

lolchat.rip

129 pointshenrychannel48 comments

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A zero-account browser chat room mimicking mid-90s online services.

The state runs on Upstash Redis and is shared across three different frontends (React/Vite deployed on Vercel):

* The standalone chat interface (https://lolchat.rip)

* A Windows 95 simulator (https://56k.rip)

* A Mac System 7 simulator (https://dialup.rip)

Users dialing in from the Mac desktop and users on the Win95 machine end up in the exact same rooms talking to each other.

maddening that you have to manually scroll

This is fixed now

Thanks man, got me right in the nostalgia.

I was having some good fun chatting with other randos on here, then a few minutes ago nearly everyone was kicked out of the room, and now I just see a few bots talking to each other with some canned phrases. Bummer.

Outage fixed :)

I hate to break it to you, but they were just bots. Log out and log back in, and they play through the same identical "conversation".

I don't know what I expected, but that was very dissapointing.

The problem with this sort of thing being so rampant on the internet is now I suspect you and the rest of the comments about interacting with this site, are either bots, or not capable of differentiating between actual human interaction and interacting with bots.

To take that thought even further, how far will this go? We already have ai phone agents larping as humans, pausing to think, simulating background chatter of a call center, and the click clacking of keys on a keyboard.

Whats next?

fair call. i took the scripted regulars out completely. everyone typing in there now is a real person. the older lines at the top are real people too, just from earlier

The first thing I did with computers that had any success was a WWIV BBS in the LA area called Altered States.

I think I ran it on a 386 under MS‑DOS. At some point I was getting about forty calls a day and the line was busy a lot. I would drop into sysop mode and talk to people sometimes. One of those times was actually a girl in real life. She ended up being my girlfriend for a couple of years -- fun times....

This was fun until I realized I was talking to bots :/

If you want to talk to people I got https://superchat.win/ which has a browser version and connects to humans.

I guess its not entirely bots, but it is impossible to tell.

It's a bunch of people spamming racial sluts. Great suggestion.

Well, yeah, I guess that happens?

Do you think it’s the less nostalgic style? Or the fact you actually talk to people that brings that out?

For what it’s worth, that was indeed a bit depressing.

It's just like 1996!

The System 7 version leaves a lot to be desired.

So many UI elements are absolutely WRONG.

(For reference: https://infinitemac.org)

different goal. infinite mac is a museum, this is closer to a theme park.

Yeah it looks nothing like it. Garbage.

Oh man, the nostalgia hit is real. Takes me straight back to my first IRC client and fumbling with Dial-up.

Neat! Reminds me of circa 92-94 Prodigy/CompuServe days. By '96 I recall having moved on to local dial-up ISPs. The longer handshake was well worth it for 56k versus the 300-2400 many of us came from.

Vibe-coded garbage full of nonsense LLM text.

There is no use case for any of this. Most of this vibe coded garbage will get abandoned in months and the deleted.

It's fun. Do you not like fun?

I do! I like sex too but that doesn’t mean I’d fuck a robot.

I would! And Cthulu willing, someday I will.

There are real people chatting on there

Vibe-coded or not what grinds my gears in those throwback computer interfaces is how imprecise they are. I the case of Windows, 9x had a meticulous pixel perfect alignment of widgets, great looking 2px thick bevel effects and all the proportions needed to be right for it feel "right". But almost all those throwback attempts, and specially now with AI coding, forget about this and seem to only go as far as thinking having a grey background with some tacky bevel is enough to recreate it.

And the font, the font is always off

Dialup isn't supposed to be this smooth.

And a skip button breaks the immersion!

I don't know... AOL chat on a 56k modem (IMO) worked better than Teams and Slack and had most of the features.

I was 12 in 96 when I got my first computer - wow does this bring back memories.

Howdy fellow child of the year of Orwell, 1984. :D

This makes me very nostalgic, but in a slightly sad way, where I remember how much better the real chat experience was back in the day.

This look-alike client struggles to show me messages in real-time. It looks like they only get pulled down in big chunks every few seconds. It also fails to scroll the new messages into view. I don't remember these sort of problems in IRC clients or IM programs of the 90s (though there were many other problems).

In a way I guess it paints the irony of modern computing, where we have several orders of magnitude more in computing power and resources, but that has only enabled us to keep rushing out perpetually unpolished, unfinished products.

It's still a bunch of fun to see a bunch of strangers talking completely unfiltered nonsense in a rudimentary chat room, though!

The UI also reminds me how clean things used to be.

Simple straightforward buttons; the screen is not filled to the brim with advertising…

Satisfyingly nostalgic. Thanks.

The modem handshake sounds to my ears like 33.3k, not 56k. Not sure if this is accurate but that how it sounds like.

This takes me right back to IRC and Netscape Navigator. The sound of a modem connecting would complete the experience!

Turn your speakers on, the sounds in there :)

That System 7 desktop brings back memories of trying to get IRC working on a PowerBook. Amazing dedication!

A D-Dial recreation with no bots and a number of regulars:

https://www.magviz.ca

Damn I had this idea but you beat me to it

I am very confused if I am speaking to real people or to LLMs

Real people! LLMs wouldn't have such a varied distribution of outputs I think ;)

thanks for all the friends I made as MY_NAMES_JEV389. Twas fun

Awesome chatting with you Jev. I never thought you were a bot despite what some people said. busysignal93

AI prose everywhere. Disappointing for something that should be a labor of love.

Looks good, reminds me of the 1990s.

wow

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