Windows 1.01 in Your Browser | Hacker News Reader

Windows 1.01 in Your Browser

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99 pointseliyak32 comments

Nice!

If you missed it, there was also a similar demo but with Windows 95 just a few days ago, http://win95.ajf.me/

Personally I find that site less interesting. It vaguely resembles Win9x, but only vaguely, it's not even trying to be faithful, and you can't really do anything.

Compare that to michaelv.org (now defunct), which very faithfully reproduced Windows 3.1, complete with games, a filesystem, various small utilities, and such. Or to win95.ajf.me (which I made) which has an actual instance of Windows 95 in it, so you can fiddle about with the real thing.

I dunno. Windows 93 is fun, but it's not quite the same experience. I'd love to make something in the same vein as michaelv.org for Windows 95. I already have win95.ajf.me, of course, but a recreation of 95 is fun for its own reasons.

It's meant to be cute, not useful.

Besides, it has a (broken) gameboy emulator!

It does have a gameboy emulator! It's Grant Galitz's GameBoy-Online.

By the way, that runs best in Firefox, due to OdinMonkey providing ahead-of-time asm.js compilation. If you have issues with Chrome, try that.

(I should really add that to the site. Hmm.)

Unfortunately launching Internet Explorer crashed the emulator in both Firefox and Chrome.

It's really fun to realize that the disks you load with all of DOS are about the size of a typical web asset.

The UI uses the "hamburger" element. I was surprised by that.

And flat UI elements. And you interact with a single program that takes up most of the screen. The more things change...

Try launching a few programs (double-click the floppy disk after each one to open the MS-DOS Executive again) and then move them around.

It's a tiled window manager!

overlapping windows was actually a challenging problem within the constraints of the old hardware.

Actually it was due to legal worries that Windows 1 only supported tiling. In Windows 2 they ignored the worries and Apple promptly sued.

There's a million links on that, this is one of the first with names and dates: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_N...

And when people ask me why I can't stand flat UI, I have to tell them that it reminds me of the UIs everybody outgrew in the 80s and early 90s because they were ugly as sin.

Flat UI just reminds me of Windows pre-95 and Mac OS pre-8, which I've never found aesthetically pleasing.

Although, back in the day, I think we would have called that icon a "grip" since it appears to have been styled after a grip floor. In fact, I still call that icon a grip because it looks more like a grip than a hamburger. I've never eaten a hamburger that has three floating equal layers.

https://www.google.com/search?q=grip+floor&source=lnms&tbm=i...

Some things really stick in your mind. The pointer acceleration, icons, sandclock.

It's funny that Paintbrush lost the constrained line drawing (no more guides), what a regression.

Also, I laughed at the TODO list. todomvc.com has nothing on it.

Sweet! I'm a bit sad that you don't get to launch Windows by typing 'win' and pressing enter.

You can if you want to! Close Windows and you are at the DOS command prompt. From there, you can do "anything"... like write a better OS, perhaps?

I left it running in another tab and then it started beeping. Thought my PC was about to die.

Absolutely terrifying w/ sound hah.

The fact that they actually tried to compete with the Mac with this is amazing to me. And, as much as I dislike Microsoft products, you have to hand it to them; they persevered until they had a product that could compete. ...at least until OS X. (I couldn't resist)

This is why everyone still used DOS. Mac OS was bloated and slow as well. It was certainly the future but the 128k wasn't nearly enough. 512k made it better but it was still years away from living up to the hype.

Until OS X, laughable. iOS has done exponentially more for Apple than OS X has or ever will.

My comment is about desktop OS comparisons.

They were not competing. Microsoft has always put phenomenal effort into backwards compatibility. Windows was constrained to work with DOS, your DOS device drivers, and most importantly your DOS apps. The majority of initial PC buyers were businesses, and those apps mattered. The last time I tried, the MSDOS 1.0 version of Visicalc (1982) still ran under Windows.

By contrast the Mac didn't provide any Apple 2 backwards compatibility (although I believe one Mac model had an add on board, and there was the IIgs). Windows and the Mac were competing in different dimensions (backwards compatible, hardware & software variety versus green field new platform).

TopView - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_TopView - GEM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager - and to a lesser extent Desqview and similar were the competition for Windows, until later OS/2 was as well.

> at least until OS X. (I couldn't resist)

I must be alone in the world but I actually dislike OS X a lot. I had been forced to work with Mac OS in several iterations of my life (I believe my earlier contact with Mac OS was with 7.6 on a Performa) and OS X had been one of the poorest. If Ubuntu weren't that buggy (it just tires me to be fixing video cards problems on every update) it would be years ahead in overal experience in comparison with OS X.

It crashed or something. Glad it didn't take down my whole computer.

C64 please!

https://www.kingsquare.nl/jsc64

It crashes if you try to run an executable from DOS.

Can someone please do DeskMate?

Really good.

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