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Windows 95: Now in "App" Form

posted by martyb on Sunday August 26 2018, @05:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the can-you-make-it-BSOD? dept.

takyon writes:

Running Windows 95 in an "app" is a dumb stunt that makes a good point: Software piracy remains an important part of preserving our digital heritage.

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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2018, @08:32AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2018, @08:32AM (#726823)

    Windows 95 could run in 4MB of RAM, if I really, really wanted to. For everyday usage, 8MB was better and 12MB was comfortable. Tried to run this thing, it ate all 700MB of RAM, hit a swap (sorry, I use multitasking so the rest of RAM was occupied, multitasking is probably today's standard I think) and hanged. BOCHS has faster emulation, and VirtualBox is even more efficient. I don't understand the goal here - if I want an app, I'd preferably go with BOCHS or even QEmu way as it's available everywhere (even in non-x86 computers!) and to run the machine I need a disk image and a text file.
    The important part for software heritage is preservation, but using patched versions for incompatible emulators is a really wrong way to preserve. Later, when more advanced and more accurate emulation software will be used, the originals may be lost and we will be left with a derivative of derivative of derivative...
    Really, preservation should be oriented around media imaging, and only if it's impossible then a copy can be used.