Windows 93 (2014)
windows93.netIt's pretty amazing how much classic software can actually run, and works pretty well. The Wolf3D clone is totally playable, and you can actually use LSDJ (one of my all-time favorite pieces of software), and it seems to be actually running the real LSDJ, too, which is pretty impressive, considering that it means that the site actually has an embedded gameboy emulator
Speaking of web emulation. It exists for a ton of platforms now (and usually requires flash).
http://play.emuparadise.me/playonline/NES/Dragon_Warrior_IV_...
http://start9.io doesn't require Flash, but requires you to upload your roms. It currently support GB, GBC & GBA games.
This is all HTML. You can inspect it.
Wait, so no emulation? Huh. Less impressive, but still quite so nonetheless.
Old HN discussions here:
This seems so amazing that I had to close it immediately, scared of how much time I would lose with it.
Same just because I'm at work, but I'll procrastinate on it at home later.
Awesome site, make sure you play the Castle Wolfenstein game and check out chapter 2 - "Operation Stallman".
It's the most /g/ thing I've seen all day.
Solitude even has the victory animation: http://i.imgur.com/IlSm5pE.png
Funnily enough if you leave the tab in the background, the events queue up and when you tab back there are a bunch of cards bouncing around at once: http://i.imgur.com/dNObRGb.png
The victory effect (js version) is credited to mr doob, and can be found here http://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/effects/solitaire/
You mean Solitaire...Solitude sounds so odd...
They called it Solitude.
We, the Dutch call it 'patience,' as how it sounds in French.
Personally, I used to call it 'sol.exe.'
I noticed a few other French easter eggs, like the names of the city "stive" is visiting during his acid trip, or that "the national train company is on strike, but you managed to reach Lille in less than 15 hours. #WIN".
Patience is what my grandma used to call it. This was in the UK so it might be called that in several European countries.
Shit outta luck.exe
Clever and artful, with a little nostalgia thrown in.
1993 was the year I started my undergrad and would not see a "web browser" until the following year. It's nice to re-capture a little of the spirit of what computing was like back then.
Tip: Be sure to click on the virus and after what happens happens, fling the icons around. Moments of mindless fun.
Old timer here as well. The 'Virtual Girl' brings back memories of the 'personal assistant' fad from way back when. Funny how we've gone back to that now that the technology is more than a gimmick with Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and GNow. Sometimes I wonder about that peroid where so many things were possible (and tried!) but the technology and infrastructure just wasn't there to make it feasible. For all the lamenting about the loss of privacy, the reality is that assistants like these aren't possible without being able to dip into our emails and browse/purchase histories. That's something Bonzi Buddy couldn't do.
We live in an odd time where the promises of the late 90s and early 2000's are coming to fruition. Suddenly VR is amazing and relatively affordable. Suddenly digital personal assistants are here and they work. The promise of a less powerful Microsoft is here and with IE a now discontinued product. Very fast internet is here with many markets having or will soon have 1gbps (note: the first LAN I worked on was 10mbps). The promise of early yet clunky smartphone/PDA revolution has also been fulfilled.
I wonder if, from a networked/social/mobile computing, perspective that period was our 'Mother of All Demos.' So much was tried and promised back then and its only in the fast few years that its really practical.
A personal assistant may "dip into emails" but shouldn't phone home. Otherwise the personal assistant metaphor doesn't fit, and other, less pleasant descriptions apply.
Your emails are already at 'home' or a similar cloud solution with questionable privacy policies. These assistants don't actually run on your device, just their front ends are run on your device. I think you're making a distinction that doesn't really exist with common use cases.
As far as what is reported back to the home company, well, that pre-dates personal assistants. What gmail does with your email or dropbox with your files and any analysis your usage is a completely separate issue than personal assistants, aside from both of them having to do with privacy. It seems to me these assistants are just dipping into stuff 'home' has had access to for a decade plus. Instead of using that info to sell to marketers or whatever, its using that info to provide value to you by powering your assistant.
The email problem may be solved separately by a yet unknown solution - maybe encryption will be part of the next Iteration.
"Personal assistants" that listen in on conversation, waiting for a keyword - that's a completely different dimension than "just" reading email.
You can disable the 'always listening' option in most (all?) of these products and just have a press to talk option. I leave mine on for convenience. There's no law saying you need to if you want to use these technologies.
- defaults matter and shape behaviour/expectations - disabling these options is often difficult - other people's phones listen to me as well - ...
Ahh the Microsoft Bob failed experiment and comically-annoying Office Assistant "Clippy"... the good ol' days. IIRC you usually had to custom install Office without the Office Assistant, desktop Toolbar and remove some other optional component which always slowed down a computer to a crawl (the early multiuser text input IIRC on Windows NT/2k/95/98).
Interestingly, recently Apple and Google both missed out on acquiring Viv as Microsoft snapped them up... ostensibly, an assistant far more integrated into third-party services with better integration developer tools/support and smarter AI. Apple and Google gotta double down on either lifting up Siri/Google's equiv. to that playing field or acquire other talent/tech to keep up.
As an aside, Microsoft finally has Nadella at the helm, whom built Azure, whom seems a better/different engineer/businessman than perhaps even Gates (much needed after Balmer)... although you can't argue that Gates didn't break ground in lopsided EULA/SLSAs for extreme profiteering (which was "better" for stockholders but "worse" for users, probably unsustainably so).
Wow, Bonzi Buddy. The memories. Hadn't heard or thought that name in easily 10 years!
> the first LAN I worked on was 10mbps
Is that what counts as old timer these days? wags cane
> The promise of early yet clunky smartphone/PDA revolution has also been fulfilled.
Hardly. The "personal" in assistant should relate to the owner of the thing, not to the people pushing it. In that sense there are few enough "personal computers", but 99.999% of all smartphones in use out there are no more personal than the posters a prisoner might put up on their cell wall. Yes, there is none configured exactly as yours, but it's still not yours personally.
I was just doing that, when the girlfriend goes "oh I remember when the computer used to do that" - my response: "you had a virus then..." :D at least back then viruses had a bit of class to em
I had that virus on Windows 98SE.
and would not see a "web browser" until the following year
Oh look, gopher with images. I can make that over a weekend!
It has probably been shown plenty of times before, but here is a linux command-line javascript one too.
Or Windows 95 (disclaimer, this is by me):
Or Windows 98 (not by me):
The real question is, how long until the typical web page includes a JavaScript Linux vm running Docker to display (ads or content)?
There is really no limit on what can be used to hog a CPU.
CPUs are space heaters. Launch some benchmarking software or heavy compilation, put your feet on your tower.
I kept a college apartment warm through the winter of 2000 with my overclocked Athlon. Barely had to touch the thermostat.
There are bitcoin miners distributed through ads.
Ha. I hadn't thought about that. Why learn web-programming eh?
> Ha. I hadn't thought about that. Why learn web-programming eh?
No, the actual program is written in Node. It's javascript all the way down my friend. :P
The Bellard one isn't just a graphics simulation though... it is actually an x86 emulator running the real program. (Bellard is the author of qemu too)
The trick in the "simulator" is to drink coffee, smoke cigarette, smoke weed then take lots of acid and procrastinate until the operating system is finished. Then launch it to finish game. I got 194 #Hero
You can also go to Paris at some point.
This is bringing back strong memories of messing around with QBASIC and Clickteam's The Games Factory.
My first game was called "Money 4 Nothing" and you moved a mouse-cursor locked guy around collecting floating cash piles and avoiding guards who usually just shot you on a loop.
In the trash, there's a zip that contains a link to this album:
so good
I think it's funny to find an old bytebeat formula I made in this.
Ahaha, it has mine too! http://i.imgur.com/z9Be34t.png
The snake game music when you click to defrag... Felt young and old at the same time.
It's actually the snake game, use your cursor keys.
Yeah, spent more time than I'd like to admit playing it...
The PlayStation boot sound kind of surprised me...
This is by hacker/musician Jankenpopp, which is why it links to their music.
Music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7fKoamz0nY (for example)
http://jankenpopp.bandcamp.com/ (full free albums)
Pretty brilliant site. Unfortunately it locked up Chrome tight after I ran the 3d program and tried to close it along with running Wolfenstein.
If you open the recycle bin there's a zip file that actually downloads through your real browser to your real computer. I didn't bother opening it. It has a filename not everyone will immediately know how to delete. That's really not a funny thing to put out there.
It contains a link to an album on bandcamp: https://jankenpopp.bandcamp.com/album/poire-c-poire-v.
Previously, it contained the album itself.
Apparently, in iTerm2, you can actually copy and paste the name, and dorm -i *.zipls *.zip rm -i cv.zipIF you can actually delete it as cv.zip then that's scary because that's not its filename.
HN has stripped the pear emoji from the filename.
> It has a filename not everyone will immediately know how to delete.
Click on the file, press delete?
I invite you to try with various file managers.
It works just fine in Nautilus for me.
Finder on OSX as well.
I forgot about that hamster dance website! Talk about something that was ahead of it's time...
I love you, Internet.
so what's the stack on this? curious how this is done. Is this like the http://copy.sh/v86/ ?
something kinda vaporwave about this
I believe that was the aesthetic the author brilliantly went for. The background and tab colors immediately struck out to me. An alternative, yet nostalgic nod to Windows 3.1
Speaking of which, to anyone interested, check out /r/Vaporwave and /r/VaporwaveAesthetics.
My eyes and mind were not ready for that! This is brilliant!
What about your ears? That startup sound caused some pretty intense flashbacks for me.
Worth checking out The Old School Emulation Center on Archive.org
> The Old School Emulation Center (TOSEC) is a retrocomputing initiative dedicated to the cataloging and preservation of software, firmware and resources for microcomputers, minicomputers and video game consoles
WIndows 93 does not work on Safari mobile :/
I had to push the turbo button on my pc.
Not IBM PC compatible
Worked for me on iOS 10.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who created a load of recursive virtual PC's inside one another. PCeption.
This is art.
Needs sheep.exe
I love the "VirtualPC" application. Recursive metahumor for the win!
Love that there's an Atari ST and ZX emulator running inside of this.
I actually had Virtual Girl running for a few days in my teenage years :)
The corgi doesn't work as expected. Can I return this for a refund?
You can cheat on the "Solitude game" (that I finished few times already) by double-clicking on hidden cards to add them to the top if they are the matching cards.
The Window Manager and opening/closing/dragging/resizing effects were really impressive for 1993. Way more than Mac at the time, or even Linux 3-4 years later.
To be fair, though, this webapp emulates the look & feel of Windows 95 (or greater), which was released in August 1995. Windows 3.1(1) (and NT 3.1 as of July 1993) were the current versions of Windows in 1993; each had far less polished effects: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x for screenshot. :)
it's a shame it's fiction
Seems to have no OLE support, so pretty authentic in my book, as that only came later. Surprised the ancient computer isn't dying under the strain of so many visits.
It's not a computer. It's not a Windows release. It's not even old.
It's a recent site that mimics (satrizes) some of the behaviors of Windows 95.
> It's not a computer. It's not a Windows release. It's not even old.
Win93 seems pretty olds to me.
> It's a recent site that mimics (satrizes) some of the behaviors of Windows 95.
How can this mimic or satitise Windows 95? I understand a less complex system can simulate a more complex system, but only slower, or maybe, but _2 years_ between releases with superior Wm functionality degraded???
It doesn't even have Winsock, and that was done in 1992!
Your comments are less funny than you think they are.
I must be crazy but when I opened this up on my phone, I thought " with a few more tweaks, this could be my go l-to mobile UI"
Does everyone else have their Microsoft lottery winner certificate? I'm itching to cash mine in for that € 250k.
It's tricky to win at SOLITUDE when the first deuce played to a foundation just disappears.
Hell yeah! That must have taken a whoooole lot of fun programming time to develop that.
Someone have a guesstimate?
Depends a lot on the developer. If it's a youngster figuring out things, we are talking about thousands of hours. A senior developer might "only" take hundreds.
I love the individual soundtracks for all the applications. They're so well-done.
Pre IE, no simulation levels
I love classic software such as windows 95. I love this!
That bounce on window open is really annoying
Why does it play the PS1 startup noise?
Because nostalgia, parody, and creative license.
Old but gold.
This is pretty amazing.. well done!
The sad part is the author did a better than Microsoft did and half of the programming was in turing incomplete languages.
I love the Vaporwave vibes
Kinda disappointed that Puke Data isn't interactive. ;- )
needs sheep.exe
Is this magic?
I love this!
c:\libs has all the javascript you need ;)
I love these things.