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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 Nuke on Sunday August 26 2018, @06:56PM (2 children)
Technically Win 3.x was a GUI on DOS (not the only one, or the first - which was VisiOn*), but it has to be admitted that Win9x was an operating system separate from DOS, although re-using parts of it. It was crap anyway and should never have been extended to Win98/ME by which time MS could have produced a lite version of NT that would have run on any entry level PC by then. It was the games on Win9x (and not on NT) that kept it going, on life support.
NT was the first even half-decent OS that MS wrote themsleves (they bought DOS); even so to write it they poached a team of coders from DEC who (it is believed) brought some VMS (DEC's OS) code with them. There was later some financial settlement between MS and DEC. Despite NT being around from 1993 for professional use (at a professional price), WIn 9x was the stepping stone to NT (now eveolved to XP) for most people.
* VisiOn, a GUI for DOS, was shown at at a trade show in 1992, Gates saw it and demanded that MS write their own GUI, which was launched as Windows 1.0 three years later.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2018, @02:45AM
Of course they used VMS in naking WNT. Add 1 to each letter in VMS and you get WNT.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Monday August 27 2018, @11:52AM
Sorry, I made a typo in my comment above. VisiOn was shown in 1982, not 1992.