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A silly new app has been doing the rounds this week: Windows 95 as a standalone application. Running on Windows, macOS, and Linux, the Windows 95 "app" combines Electron (a framework for building desktop applications using JavaScript and other Web technology) with an existing x86 emulator written in JavaScript. The emulator can run a bunch of operating systems: for the app, it's preloaded with Windows 95.
This is, of course, software piracy. The developer of the app has no rights to distribute Windows 95 like this, and I'm a little surprised that the app hasn't been yanked from GitHub yet. And for now, the app is just a toy; there's no real reason to run Windows 95 like this, other than the novelty factor of it actually working.
But Windows 95 (and software that runs on or requires Windows 95) was an important piece of computing history. I think a case could be made that it's Microsoft's most important Windows release of all time, and its influence continues to be felt today. Not only was it technically important as an essential stepping stone from the world of 16-bit DOS and Windows 3.x to 32-bit Windows NT, and not only did it introduce a user interface that's largely stayed with us for more than 20 years—Windows 95 was also a major consumer event as people lined up to buy the thing as soon as it was available. A full understanding of the computing landscape today can't really be had without running, using, and understanding Windows 95.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Sunday August 26 2018, @11:22PM
I've been hearing this story for twenty years. I don't know why people love it so much.
If Win95 is not a "real" OS by your definition of OS, that's fine. But it must not have anything to do with DOS because DOS is hardly more than a file system driver and some basic I/O functions. Even memory management was mostly handled by separate installable drivers (ie. HIMEM). Win95 has its own drivers to replace that stuff. Even Windows for Workgroups had an optional 32-bit file system driver to take over for the 16-bit DOS one.
WinNT came first, but it was too bloated to run on what was affordable hardware of the time. And it was less useful because it couldn't run DOS stuff that people needed to run. Marketing was not yet sufficiently advanced at that time to spin this as a good thing.