It didn't look like this. Especially not in 1993. They are mixing a bunch of metaphors from different time periods. Mostly late 90s but nothing ever animated like this either.
There were add-ons that added animated tricks to the window manager even back in the Win3.1 days. Nothing like you get with more modern GPU-based compositing techniques as everything had to be done in software and CPUs were not all that fast, but you could get animated icons, windows that slid or faded into view, and other such.
It was slow and jerky, even on what was high-end kit at the time, but that didn't stop people playing.
Running such software was a first class way to bring on a blue-screen, or in "standard mode" just hang everything, of course!
My brother could crash Windows 3.1 in Standard Mode just by mashing the keyboard in some particular way that I could never reproduce. Never took more than 10-15s of elbows on keys before we got a BSOD on an otherwise stable machine.
A few years ago I let my young son examine a keyboard connected to a Linux computer with a locked screen and in a few seconds he showed me my first kernel panic. I never figured out how he did it.
Completely unrelated, but you just brought back some wonderful memories of the elementary school computer lab when all the students would mash the shift key when they wanted help, so when the whole class got stuck, there would be a chorus of motherboard buzzers. Good times.
Active Desktop was just a HTML desktop (it didn't animate the window forms) and it part of Internet Explorer 4 so quiet late into the life of Windows 95. Probably around 1997 if I had to guess. There certainly wasn't anything like that on Windows 3.x which is what people would have been using in 1993.
There were third party addons that did some pretty crazy things. I don't know if animations were among them, but I do remember at least one that would completely retheme windows with different shapes and layouts, Windowblinds I think it was called.
Thanks for refreshing my memory. Those were pretty cool programs back then.
I definetly remember Windowsblinds too (and geez, it seems they're still around ...).
I was into LiteStep, which basically was a shell replacement for explorer.exe.
I'm also reminded how trivially easy it was to configure Win9x to use a different shell: you'd just edit system.ini under [boot] to say shell=litestep.exe and you were done.
> I'm also reminded how trivially easy it was to configure Win9x to use a different shell: you'd just edit system.ini under [boot] to say shell=litestep.exe and you were done.
Fun fact, Win98 still had progman.exe installed (from win 3.1 and earlier). I had to switch to it in system.ini one day when something in explorer got corrupted and the normal UI wouldn't load.
You could do that trick even in windows 3.11. I remember using central point desktop for a while: 3d look, virtual desktops, advanced file manager and a bunch of other goodies in the 3.x era.
Litestep was fun, especially for those of us that couldn't get away with installing Linux on the family computer.
I also used eFX, which was a free Windowblinds competitor that made it super easy to make skins, and released a ton of garish and ugly ones back in the day.
The nice thing about running Linux is that my FVWM config looks pretty much the same now as it did in 1995, bitmapped fonts and all. Can't improve on perfection.
I think he run it under a VirtualDeskop mode, where its physical screen would be smaller than the X11 video mode, thus, having to scroll up and down to show the full Fvwm Pages.
Thanks, I had forgotten that mode, but I remember it now.
In those days as I recall setting X to work at a good resolution was sometimes much more painful than it had to be. Since the 2000s (after the fork to Xorg for example) autoconfig got a lot better. I seem to recall it was possible to trigger a config that would give you a very low physical resolution but high res virtual desktop.
Uh, not in 93, but around 98/2000 definitely it looked like this. Well, without the animated windows effects. (I’m looking at v1 only, on mobile at the moment)
You’re right about 93, but if you go about five years later and keep all the animations turned on, it looked a lot like this. Those animations killed performance so I suspect that most people on here turned them off as quickly as I did, but this is a pretty good reproduction. It’s good enough that as I poke around, I remember specific events from my relative youth...
Animated windows weren't a thing even in the late 90s. That required a compositing window manager. Linux was one of the first platforms to get them and Compiz wasn't even released until the mid 00s. Vista was the first MS operating system to properly support compositing (though XP -- and 2000 via undocumented APIs -- did support transparency effects).
Animated icons have never existed aside from hacks like Active Desktop or active running programs in system tray / taskbar (again, using hacks where the icon was changed every second).
There were things that people called animated windows and animated icons at the time, but the meaning was quite different from what we think about today. For example: an animated window was an animation effect on the frame when a window was opened or closed, while an animated icon could be showing one icon for a closed folder and another icon for an open folder. (These recollections are from 1995 era OS/2. Windows had it's own stuff going on, but I pretty much ignored it from the introduction of Windows 95 until late Windows XP.)
That's not what "Windows 93" (the site posted) is doing though. However I do take your point about the window borders, I had forgotten that was referred to as "window animations".
I don't agree with your icon point though. I don't recall anyone calling those boolean icon states as "animated".
I'm pretty sure the API that changed the window transparency was documented in 2K, because I distinctly remember reading how to do it on MSDN after first seeing one of those in an app.
It was documented in Windows XP but I think it was Vista that really promoted the use of that effect ("Aero" was it?). Happy to be proved wrong about Windows 2000 but I don't recall seeing any documentation on MSDN back when I was playing around with Windows APIs.
I remember I pinched the API guide for XP thinking "if it works in XP then it must work in Windows 2000" and the reason I remember that so vividly was because it didn't work properly. In fact it caused a kernel panic. Which was pretty much the only time I managed to upset Windows 2000 badly enough to cause a "blue screen of death".
It definitely worked in 2K - there were many apps that implemented it as a bling feature as soon as it became known. The question is whether it was documented at the time.
If you were able to build it for Win2K, and it compiled successfully, then it was supported - it wouldn't be in the headers otherwise. Even if you build it with XP as a target, and then run on 2K, you'd get a regular Win32 error about not being able to resolve a symbol from a DLL. Getting a BSOD indicates a driver issue.
Aero in Vista was something else - it was the first version of Windows that did whole desktop composition, and so it could do all kinds of fancy stuff, similar to Compiz that preceded it on Linux. Transparent windows in 2K/XP used per-window composition.
Did that use Microsoft API though? It might have been possible to hack your own library to do the same thing as I'm pretty sure there were are Win32 APIs to read and write pixels outside of your form -- albeit performance almost certainly wouldn't be on a par doing it that way.
(I say "pretty sure" because I once wrong a program to create a second mouse cursor but which was controlled via a game controller. The logic being I could multi-task my GUI operations. Obviously the logic was flawed and that application proved dumb but it was a fun development exercise none-the-less. Anyhow, I think I drew the cursor directly to screen by reading and writing pixels using some Win32 API; but I'm not super confident of that memory).
I'm not entirely sure... I know it worked in 2K, but didn't work for Win9x line, so I'm pretty sure it was in 2K/NT APIs, and not the 3.x/9x/me line. I don't think it was used by any of MS's internal themes until XP though.
- isn't window manager (ie a compositing window manager could use Xrender for compositing (like KWin supports when OpenGL isn't available) but Xrender itself isn't a WM)
- and isn't even available on Windows (which was the OS we were talking about)
I think perhaps you might have misunderstood me? (it wasn't my clearest written post).
We are talking about how the composite extension for X was a must for FX, I said bullshit because I had these effects long before the X entension and Compiz.
And I know XRender is not a WM, FFS, my first distro was Debian Woody so I know my shit better than those Compiz bling-bling new users.
And not only KWIN did that, a lot of WM's did different FX in software by either using XRender or custom coding (such as Afterstep).
> We are talking about how the composite extension for X was a must for FX
1. No. I was talking about Windows. Compiz was mentioned as a comparison to give an idea of time lines. You then decided to interpret my entire post to mean something quite different.
2. The comment about compositing was window managers, not X. Xrender, in this context, would be equivalent to OpenGL (albeit one uses hardware frame buffers et al and the other uses software).
3. Even in your Xrender point, the window animations in Linux would still have to be done via a compositing window manager such as Kwin -- which supports both Xrander and OpenGL libraries.
3 (i). ...or if not a compositing WM, an entirely separate display manager replacing X. Though even there, you'd likely still want to go down the compositing route because it's much easier.
> And I know XRender is not a WM, FFS, my first distro was Debian Woody so I know my shit better than those Compiz bling-bling new users.
1. Then why are you flipflopping between different stacks of libraries as if they're one and the same?
2. The length of time you've been using Linux isn't a useful yardstick for how much more you might know stuff
2 (i). Furthermore, HN is a technical crowd so I'm sure most on here have been using Linux at least that long. I've been running Slackware since the 90s and I know from previous conversations I'm far from a unique case. So I'd be careful about assuming your audience when commenting on here.
2 (ii). It's also worth noting that almost no new users would be using Compiz these days anyway. There's just no need when most of the popular desktop environments ship their own compositing WMs. Plus the novelty factor just isn't there now like it was back in 00s.
3. Also please tone down your language. There's no need to be rude.
> And not only KWIN did that, a lot of WM's did different FX in software by either using XRender or custom coding (such as Afterstep).
1. Nobody said compositing had to happen in hardware.
2. "FX" like menu transparencies (as you mentioned elsewhere) isn't even remotely the same as the window animations originally being discussed and being demonstrated in the Windows 93 demo linked to; and for a multitude of reasons:
2 (i) For starters you're overlaying within the same window. Things used to get trickier when you needed "FX" to interact with parts outside of your form (worse still, other applications too).
2 (ii) Transparency also wasn't computationally expensive to do in software compared to the kind of transformations that Compiz did -- and that the Windows 93 demo does. The Compiz/93 style animations simply wouldn't have been practical for general purpose computing without hardware graphics libraries (bare in mind the specifications of the average computer in the 90s and early 00s).
2 (iii) ...and I know this from experience because I used to write graphical shells for both Windows and Linux in the late 90s and early 00s.
>wouldn't have been practical for general purpose computing without hardware graphics
Or just VESA and Windows' optimized 2D libraries. GDI is a good example. Most 2D FXs don't require a hard computation. Seriously, Enlightenment did those in software.
You underestimate what could've done in software in the 90's, especially when memory protection under w9x was nil and everything was much more low level.
Insecure? A lot. Would it work? Yes.
Windows 98 could do these with 3rd party software.
>Slackware in late 90's
Debian Woody was almost like late 90's for obvious reasons.
It shipped a 2.2 kernel with 2.4 being the optional and bleeding edge one.
> Or just VESA and Windows' optimized 2D libraries. GDI is a good example.
From what I remember of GDI (and admittedly it's been a while since I've done graphics development on Windows) GDI wasn't designed for real time animations. It was more designed for static (or at least semi-static) scenes like image editing. Real time transformations is a whole different ball game.
Either way, GDI certainly wasn't optimised. If you wanted optimised then you'd have used DirectDraw (which doesn't exist now but back then it was a thing).
> Most 2D FXs don't require a hard computation.
But we're not talking about "fx" as you keep calling it, we're talking about real time transformations interacting with multiple different canvases (to borrow a term from web development). Wobbly windows is a whole different ball game to transparent forms. Then you need to factor in that those transformations need to happen without slowing desktop performance.
Windows 9x used to do really basic "animations" which required no transformation effects and even that used to get turned off by a great many people on modest hardware because of the impact it had on performance.
You're just not being realistic about either the transformation effects in question (repeatedly moving the goal posts to basic translucency on stationary forms) nor the hardware of the era in question.
> Seriously, Enlightenment did those in software.
Enlightenment is a seriously cool piece of engineering but it didn't do compositing until E16. And it wasn't even the early versions of E16 either. So we're not talking late 90s / early 00s there either.
Also did Enlightenment really do that in software or are you just assuming it did?
> You underestimate what could've done in software in the 90's, especially when memory protection under w9x was nil and everything was much more low level.
Graphics development was not more low level. The opposite was actually the problem: Windows APIs lacked direct hardware access the early part of the 9x life time. In fact literally the entire point of GDI was to offer an approximation of what could be done with direct hardware access but without giving Windows developers low level APIs. The obvious side-effect of that is a massive performance hit. There was a reason DirectDraw was so sorely needed and a reason why a great many games developers still favoured DOS for the early part of 9x's life.
> Windows 98 could do these with 3rd party software.
But it didn't do real time transformation effects and that 3rd party software often ran like a sack of shit on peoples systems. Usually the people you saw who ran it well were gamers on high end systems.
> Debian Woody was almost like late 90's for obvious reasons.
No it wasn't. It was released in 2002[1]. The testing repo for woody wasn't even created until mid December 2000[2] (so basically 2001).
To counter the downvotes from people who are certain there was no “Win93”, here are two internal MSFT emails referring to the same, in clear reference to what ended up being Win95.
Nah, I don't think so, Windows 95 was codenamed Chicago before it was released. I can't remember ever having seen the name "Windows 93" mentioned in that time.
You're right, apparently, and I was wrong. Wikipedia says so too:
> So the development of Windows "Chicago" was started and, as it was planned for a late 1993 release, became known as Windows 93 which was also known as Windows 4.0.
I thought they had some design ideas in a later cancelled OS called Cairo, then they had a release codenamed Chicago which ported some ideas but dramatically scaled back, and that was Win95.
At the time there were two branches, the win 3.1 branch, which was consumery, and the NT branch which was for servers / developers, etc. Cairo was an OS based on the NT branch, which was ultimately cancelled. Chicago was the project name for win95, which came off the 3.1 branch. Eventually the NT/3.1 branches merged, in the release called XP. And yeah, there's no such thing as windows 93.
There may have been some overlap, but as I remember it the main thrust of Cairo wasn't really about UI. It was an object based filesystem, and some other fancy shit going on under the covers. (I was on Apps, and we never targetted Cairo, never got a chance to play with it directly, but I saw it demoed a few times, and I remember the UI looking more like NT/3.11. Could easily be misremembering that part though)
EDIT: Yeah, you're right, there was some UI that made it to 95. From wikipedia:
"The Windows 95 user interface was based on the initial design work that was done on the Cairo user interface."
Windows Me was still in 95/98 development line and is internally versioned as 4.2. 2000 and XP were 5.x, Vista was 6.0, Windows 7 was 6.1, Windows 8 was 6.2, and Windows 10 probably would have been internally 7.0 if they hadn't bumped the internal number forward to match.
Heh, yeah, I remember when they switched to labelling everything by year. Those of us on the development teams thought that was seriously tempting fate given our track record of routinely shipping things a year late.
Heh, no, but it was a close call. Shipped in August of 95. I was working on Office "95" at the time, and we were seriously under the gun, for a few reasons. Firstly, it came down from on high that all Office apps needed to be ported to 32-bit, as opposed to running in Win95's 16 bit subsystem (this was a massive job, and introduced numerous bugs). And to make matters worse, this was a time when software was delivered in boxes, which contained CDRoms, or 3.25" floppies, as the customer desired. Win95 had completely reserved all of msft's manufacturing capacity for like 6-7 weeks, so in order to ship in 95, we had to ship like 2 months earlier than a normal release.
This is my favourite part about my 3 year old. I love when he combines his imagination with his ability to have unwavering opinions on things.
Recently: a conversation in which he insisted that no, that person isn't my dad, it's his grandpa. But I have a dad too. No, you're my dad. That's grandpa. etc.
Also I'm apparently five years old which is very old. Mom got off easy. She's four.
You say that you have a dog? Yes, a villain of a one, said Clesippus. And he has puppies? Yes,and they are very like himself. And the dog is the father of them? Yes, he said, I certainly saw him and the mother of the puppies come together. And is he not yours? To be sure he is. Then he is a father, and he is yours; ergo, he is your father, and the puppies are your brothers.
I love this comment - it describes so much of my child and reminds me so much of her, right down to her confidence about her grandparents’ ages.
She’s a little older so she knows some pretty big numbers. I’m 20, her granny and grandpa are 20 and she’s either 4 or if she wants to be the boss she’s ‘10 hundred’. :)
Last Friday, at my parents house, I showed my four year old an album of me as baby, when she failed to guess who's in the pictures and was told it's me, her face was at first sheer horror, then total disbelief.
I’m very sorry. My child has a wonderful imagination and loves to tell stories. Sometimes the stories happened (they are true) and sometimes they didn’t really happen (they are stories). In our family, we have telling truths (these are things she saw and that I can ask other adults about) and telling stories (these are things that she didn’t see with her eyes). We don’t have a concept of lying yet, but that will likely come this year. For now, ‘telling stories’ fills the role of lying.
I can remember stuff from quite a young age, I think that one thing I took from getting books read to me was that inventing worlds and setting stories in those worlds was just something that everyone did.
We read almost constantly and she has been surrounded with books since she was an infant. Now that she’s a little bit older, she ‘reads’ and I read to her. At bedtime, she’ll often ‘read’ a book with a lot of pictures, then I’ll read it back to her and then we’ll switch to a book with fewer pictures and I’ll read it to her until she goes to sleep.
Do you have any book recommendations? I’m always looking to add to the library! :)
Our system (king county library system) is top notch, and their children section is organized with books specific to children development: life events, feelings, bedtime, concepts, etc.
Every two weeks I go and pick out new books, rotating topics.
We live two blocks from a library and she goes regularly. It’s great on weekends (especially during the winter) - it’s full of kids and it’s a lot of fun.
I like asking people for book, television or even website suggestions. We’ve found some unbelievable gems that way, including a site she uses to ‘wave to the International Space Station.’ :)
I guess it's more the fanciful sort of talking about things that don't actually exist like a book does, versus the impact intent to deceive that goes with lying.
That’s a perfect description. She’s a kind, innocent little person with a big heart and a big imagination. Sometimes the line between imagination and fact is a little fuzzy, but I don’t think it has the intent of a lie. They’re just stories...
Ha that line is really blurry sometimes. I told my kid that I fly to work, thinking he'd do that sideways glance nose-scrunch thing and realise it was a fictional story quite easily: instead he got worried that I shouldn't fly too high.
I suggested I could tunnel like a mole instead, but apparently that's ridiculous!
It's cute when kids with their not-yet-developed brains to it, but when adults do it pathological lying, narcissism, psychopathy, or various other personality disorders.
This is a good point and it’s one that I try to be mindful of. At this point, it’s age appropriate but at some point we’ll start talking about consequences, truth and lies.
The strangest part of parenting is how quickly time flies. A little over four years ago, I sent my parents pictures from the first ultrasound. Today, the baby in the ultrasound is sitting here, eating an orange and watching My Little Pony. It’s been years, but it feels like minutes...
It’s wonderful but it goes by too fast and there’s a heck of a lot of responsibility crammed into a short number of years.
I'm quite unconvinced by that. This might be true, but most of "kid imagination" I've seen or heard of was mashing up things they've had some experience with ("the dinosaur fights the action man", "my uncle can teleport"...). They don't seem to be able to think in the abstract, or even think outside any box (such as imagining that somebody could be more than 10yo! What would a 1000yo, 10000yo be like? An adult would have much much more imagination).
We find them funny and weird because they take mash up things we got bored or familiar with (dinosaurs, age), so they shake up our world a bit. But imaginative? Some adults are terrible at imagination, but many are amazing
This site is truly amazing, it's really inspiring to see how some people can get so creative using the old Desktop GUI metaphor.
I'm personally curating a list [1] of all these websites and webapps that look like vintage desktop UIs.
Apologies I'm not familiar with request process on your github.
Your list is great, I have some of those already saved as bookmarks.
But here is another good one, Amiga workbench;
http://www.chiptune.com/
Thanks so much for this site, it's really well crafted!
For your information you can simply modify the file README.md and then open a pull request for your submission.
There is even more. There is a selection of old Amiga demos that run in an emulator! Whoever made this stuff is a genius for putting this sprawling thing together.
Not a proper BSOD but there's an evocation. Have you tried "crazy" in the Terminal? You'll go for a 3 min ride of music with funky animation starting with a BSOD sprite. (It's probably the same as Start > Programs > crazy but as much as I liked it, I won't run it twice.)
I managed to do that too (browser freezing until I closed the tab, also in Firefox) but there's supposed to be a proper BSoD. I found a screenshot of it:
Found it! Open "/c/files/documents/keynotes/opening/" file and keep clicking on the next button (the triangle) until you reach the last page with "Windows 93. Are you ready?" text. Click on "Are you ready?"
I wonder what "global thermonuclear war" in the terminal does. It probably starts a game of Hangman or something. It would be ironic if it were a double-bluff, though.
I kind of miss how speedy and usable a desktop like this was. I remember running Windows 95 on 64MB RAM (even did it on 16MB, barely) on a 486 DX2 66MHz (it was something someone else had thrown out, in the era of Pentium IIs, I was poor).
And then installing RedHat 6.0 from a magazine cover CD and using FVWM and wondering how I could make my feeble poor machine look like the glorious KDE2 and GNOME desktops gracing the pages of said magazine.
64MB?? wow. My 486/33 had 4MB. I eventually was able to upgrade to 16MB (I think it cost like $400 though), and my linux kernel compile times went down from 8 hours to 12 minutes. That was the day I truly learned how much swapping affected performance.
Yes, it was a bunch of SIMMs (I think - they had metal edge clips to destroy your fingers compared to modern DIMM insertion) that they chucked out at school (they gave them to me instead of binning them). It would have been more normal for 16MB in the days when a 486 was mainstream but this was many many years after 486 were considered ancient - 1998 to 2000 I think? I was poor and my paper-round only stretched to buying Micromart and looking at computers I couldn't afford.
My 386 PS/2 Model 70 had 2 MB and ran 16 MHz. I copied Windows 3.0 from a school computer, using the arj file compressor, to a bunch of diskettes and then to this computer. Started no problem when I typed "win" on the DOS prompt.
Long after I had switched to Linux, I helped my grandmother with Windows 95 on a 486 DX4 at 100MHz. I had completely forgotten how snappy a UI could be on modest hardware.
Also KDE2 was indeed perfect. They had built all the features one needs in a desktop, and ever since everything has been half baked.
I liked KDE 3.5 as it had everything in it (Konqueror was useful with the protocols for SSH file transfer etc., it really did everything) but the KDE2 with the purpley CDE look was great.
Not so keen on modern Linux UIs. They seem to be copying macos (not a bad thing) but I am using LXDE or XFCE these days.
I remember Windows 95 being fast and able to keep up with keyboard shortcuts that you typed in a flurry. The modern systems can't. And in Windows 10, half of the metro apps and settings apps don't even have keyboard shortcuts. It's step back IMHO, and indicates that they were "designed" by users who only use the mouse.
Hackernews clears the existing post check after a given time period. Refreshing old stuff occasionally is not against the rules and sometimes encouraged because not everyone sees it the first time, or sometimes people just like to comment on reruns.
Last one (from GPs list) was from 2017. I wouldn't call this a blatant repost by any means. And there are some good conversations going on too, so there's value in that.
My point: don't sweat it, it was good that you posted this.
Yeah, that functionality, and the presence of dupe detection when posting, is what makes it a surprise to me that when they let a "dupe" through that they don't use the existing functions to just list the past stories.
I post links to previous threads a lot, and find that there's enough judgment required to do it properly that I'm skeptical about automating it. Maybe I'll get over that, because doing it manually is a pain.
Ahaha this is great, the laggy emulator, the unwinnable minesweeper, the horrible delays caused by a system full of spyware and garbage. The desktop seemed maybe a little bit too clean though, there wasn't icons half off the screen or hidden entirely and it lacked the random files typically placed or saved there because if it's not on the desktop it doesn't exist.
Mad props for running completely smooth on Firefox Preview for Android. Drag to select, double click, window resize, everything just works perfectly. Why can't modern SPAs work as well?
Very true. The ones that don't, I don't know what their excuse is.
Maybe they thought they would add performance later. Maybe they pulled in dependencies willy-nilly without truly understanding the problem space. Maybe it's a result of the frantic rush to add features.
Somehow it has become acceptable to keep users waiting for multiple seconds. It's crazy and often unnecessary.
For example, I just built a trivia game PWA[0]. >1MB in size, including ~30 SVG illustrations. 7kb per game. Writing offline mode now, it will add ~1.45mb but only once, at "install" time. It's only MVP but it's already fast.
Whatever the cause, it makes me very frustrated as a user and front ender.
That was one of the first daft websites I remember visiting, when it was first possible to use the Internet on a computer at school. (That's a computer, the one with the dial-up modem.)
Does anyone remember the address to a website that loaded basically a full blown VM of a random vintage OS? This reminded me of that and I've been wracking my brain to try to remember it
I find that quit upsetting since it’s clearly the authors choice to not support Safari and not any particular failure of the browser. It’s my goto browser for everyday surfing, fast, light and with great standards support.
I can understand choosing not to support it. Safari is frustrating to web developers because you can't legally test on it without owning Apple hardware. Whereas Microsoft provides free virtual machines for testing on its browsers. I've done the same thing on my personal sites - I've outright blocked Safari with a message explaining that I won't unblock it until Apple provides a Safari VM.
They used to provide builds of Safari and Webkit for Windows; people complained endlessly about the very fact of their existence. Apple stopped providing them. True story.
Also, outright blocking Safari users is sort of obnoxious.
Sorry but that's not even remotely close to being the same. The Windows builds were notoriously badly supported and were never equivalent from a debugging perspective. Microsoft made a genius move by providing its IE VMs, and if Apple didn't want to force developers into its ecosystem they'd have done the same.
I agree that it's obnoxious, but I'd rather do that than deal with Safari users complaining about bugs on my sites that I have no intention of buying a Mac or breaking the law to fix. I'd rather avoid the bug reports and let the users know that it's Apple fixing it. The sites I run are entirely free and paid for out of my own pocket anyway, so I don't want my money going towards people who support Safari. I've considered blocking Chrome, too, for other reasons.
This is quite impressive, I played with PukeData and it works quite well. And the maze3d in ascii is quite brilliant too though I find it quite hard, everything looks the same. And the Halflife 3 is mocking me, it appears to be loading but keeps on initializing silly stuff like VR Pizza, etc..
My favorite site for when a colleague forgot to lock his PC. Win93, put the browser in full screen mode and it looks like the PC has been haunted or hacked. Took some of them minutes to find out what was going on, especially because the programs are functional.
All the apps work, this must have taken forever, there's a full solitaire game, ms paint, etc. each one not that easy to do in JS, well done. I wonder why? It's a lot more than a proof-of-concept or prototype.
I'm pretty upset that I couldn't outsmart the AI and win tic-tac-toe. I wrote some tic-tac-toe "AI" a while back, and it wasn't as good as this one. I could beat mine...
Weird quirk, but it seems that MineSweeper / BrianSweeper always places a mine in the upper-right corner. I usually start here, and 30 games in a row it had a mine in that position.
I'm kinda curious about the backstory. For example, the NES emulator is kinda cool, (even though I can't get the arrow keys to work,) and each game is an accomplishment in itself.
This reminds me of a browser based computing environment demo (I believe it was WebOS or MyWebTop) in the late 1990s. We have indeed come a long way in the last 20 years.
It's not just you. The original minesweeper generates mines after your first click so it can ensure you will not lose on the first click. This version seems to instead make sure a mine is always under your cursor after the first click. I love it.
They have been able to do it for the past 15 years! I remember I had a bunch of emulators that were running in Applet and Flash to play games on a school computer using a browser. I guess emulators in JS are more recent, but I have no doubt a Game Boy one would have run a decade ago at least.
Social media on windows93.net is a massive live UGC sandbox. Take for example https://myspace.windows93.net/ , you could spend days getting lost in retro parody reenactment without even wrapping the experience in the windows93 desktop.
Edit - The four year old doesn’t believe that I went to school. This is going to be quite the ride to daycare...