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

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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 26 2018, @06:33PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 26 2018, @06:33PM (#726637)

    Nobody said it was first, or technically superior compared to Windows NT. They said more important.

    Windows NT was a good OS for its day, in the role of file and print server for Windows based networks, or as a Microsoft ecosystem database server. It also had limited compatibility with applications designed for windows 3.1, essentially no ability to run DOS software and no value for running games, beyond minesweeper and solitaire anyway. It was no more useful as a desktop OS to the majority of people than Linux is today.

    Windows 7 eventually showed that the world envisioned by NT was good, but it took almost two decades to get there. If not for Windows 95 and its successors, everyone would have been stuck with DOS and probably would have eventually ended up abandoning Microsoft entirely.

    Microsoft could have gotten along without NT. It couldn't have without 95.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Sunday August 26 2018, @06:50PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 26 2018, @06:50PM (#726639) Journal

    Windows NT was a good OS for its day

    If you're talking about Windows NT 3.1, I slightly disagree in that I was not very impressed with it. It required a minimum of 16MB RAM during the days when having 8MB ("filling up all 8 slots") was remarkable. It didn't support long file names on FAT. It was slow and clunky. The 16-bit virtual machine in which it ran existing windows software was especially slow on the hardware of the time. NT 3.1 was advanced in that in was a true 32-bit operating system with pre-emptive multitasking and pretty much the features of a modern operating system, but in very rough form.

    If you're talking about Windows NT in general, its "day" is 1993-present, as it's the current windows [microsoft.com] being sold by Microsoft (as "Windows 10").

    Microsoft could have gotten along without NT. It couldn't have without 95.

    Microsoft has provided and updated Windows NT from 1993-present, 25 years and counting. Microsoft provided and updated Windows 95 from 1995-2000, 5 years etched into a headstone.

    Your position seems odd in part because with no Windows NT, Microsoft would have had no operating system product for the last twenty years. That would be fine with me; I don't use Windows anyway. But it doesn't reflect reality.