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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 26 2018, @06:10PM
Win95 pretty much just used DOS to load itself up into memory. Then scooped the brains out and put itself in place on all of the interrupts and put itself into protected mode. I think you overlook the importance of it and what writing a protected mode program on x86 was like back in 94/95 (hint you pretty much had to ignore all of DOS and write your own 'os'). Going from DOS to NT was a challenge. But going from win95->NT programmatically was a good move for MS. The API was similar enough that many times it 'just worked'. The EXE format is the same one they defined in 95 and ports easily. Win3.x was a DOS shell and they reused as much of DOS as it could get away with. The API was dissimilar enough you spent usually many months hunting down compatibility bugs.