This is super cool! Ran into an issue though, the first time it boots perfectly, after the first refresh it loads for a bit (downloads the image again instead of from cache) and then a cachebuster URL is added and loading starts over, without ever finishing. Ideally it would just load from cache on refresh.
I started from Windows 98 and always loved the icons. They actually represented the application and purpose. These days they are more focused on looking modern. Lots of times they are not even distinguishable between each other.
If this were a commercial project then I could understand the complaint.. but this is just a small, for-fun project and they have little motivation to put the extra effort into support for all browsers.
Bellard (yes, him) already had a working VM of Windows 2000 in the browser around a decade ago, with no specific "support for all browsers" (whatever that means):
I'm not really complaining; just harking back to a shitty time that is, on some commercial sites, threatening to return. Especially as Apple finally allows Chrome on iOS, eroding the main bastion against it: Safari.
Ah. Every time I look at the UI, I realize just how much the modern UI/UX degraded.
We had clear colorful icons, text labels, scrollbars, clearly distinguishable checkboxes. And now we have UI that actively promotes "rebelliousness" and "being in the know".
True story, and keep it in your hat if you know it:
I was expelled from highschool about 3 months in to my freshman year for doing this on the library computers to bypass the librarian needing to log us in, because the Mac lab printers weren't working and the report was due next period. Librarian was like "nah i'm on lunch" so i waited like 15 minutes, bypassed, printed, exited windows.
She was fuming, shaking showing printed papers with "autoexec.bat" showing an edit time[1] while she "was on lunch" and i "was the only one in there".
I actually got expelled from that school 3 times, twice for "hacking."
[1] hold shift to get to MS-DOS without restriction, edit AUTOEXEC.BAT to comment out the "security" "software" line, reboot. remove the commented line, reboot.
Office really chugged on the PCs of the time though. We can debate whether modern Excel actually delivers enough more value than historical Excel to justify being as more resource-hungry, thus slower to load, as it is. But historical Excel appears fast on modern hardware, even in emulation, because the CPU, RAM, and permanent storage have had 30 years to evolve since it was released. Contemporary 386s and 486s would not have been that snappy.
Let's go back to say around 1994/5. I've just got a job as the first dedicated IT bod for a pie factory near Plymouth (Devon not MA)! Win 3.11 was pretty much everywhere and was almost reliable - patching wasn't really a thing then in the MS world. By then Pentium (586) was a thing but the majority of machines were 80486, 80386s were still useful. There were also the 386/486 SX/DX and DX2 and Cyrix and so on.
The planning spreadsheets were a series of Lotus 1-2-3 jobbies with a lot of manual copy and pasting and I gradually ported it to a Excel VBA job. To cut a long story short, I was running Win311 and Excel on a Pentium 75 with 16MB RAM, IDE HDD. Excel was way quicker to start than on a modern PC running Win 11 with an SSD.
Yes, a lot of things took a while but I ended up with a finite capacity plan in VBA for an entire factory that took less than five minutes per run. That was for meat and dough prep, make, bake and wrap and dispatch for 150 odd finished product lines. It generated a labour plan as well and ran totally to forecast (which it also did). Pasties, sossie rolls etc are generally made to forecast - they take a while to get through the plant and have to be delivered into depot with enough code (shelf life) for the customer (store) to be able to sell them and the consumer to not be given a dose of the trots. As reality kicked in, you input the actual orders etc and it refined the plan.
OK not the best tool for the job but I hope I show that a spreadsheet back in the day was more than capable of doing useful things. I've just fired up LO calc on my laptop with a SSD and it took longer than I remember old school Excel starting up or perhaps the same time.
This is just not true. The only chugging back then was reading from disks, and the entire Office suite was only a handful of 3.5" floppies. If you had already started Excel earlier, then it was likely still cached in RAM and would start nearly instantly. If not, then it was still only a few seconds.
Now what was slow was actual computations. Like try running a big spreadsheet in Excel or counting words in a big Word document on that hardware. It takes a very long time, while on modern hardware it's nearly instant.
This isn't true at all, based on my experiences. Contemporary 386s were kind of slow, I guess, but these programs did not chug on a 486. I spent tons and tons of time in Excel and Access and writing VB/VBScript/macros.
They haven't released the old Excels as open source right?
Wonder if its feasible to reverse the old version using LLMs, vibecode it to run on modern platforms and then shorehorn in support for modern XLS format. At the rate LLMs are improving I hope someone will eventually partake in this challenge!
> Wonder if its feasible to reverse the old version using LLMs, vibecode it to run on modern platforms and then shorehorn in support for modern XLS format.
Oh no it won't. Photoshop PSD and the legacy Office file formats have one thing in common... they are raw dumps of the C in-memory structs representing the contents. That's how they save and load so fast [1], in contrast to the modern formats which are a bunch of XMLs in a ZIP in a trenchcoat. Unfortunately, that makes reverse engineering them not just a challenge in itself, but also reimplementing because you have to reimplement Microsoft's original engines piece by piece, quirk by quirk.
And that's before wading into the mess that is OLE or, yes, the older people will shudder, ActiveX. Or the wonders that VBA macros could achieve, including just running stuff directly from kernel32.dll. I'm reasonably sure you could import the DirectX DLLs into an Office VBA macro and implement a full blown 3D shooter engine with DirectX instead of Excel.
And that's also why conversion in either direction almost always carries loss potential, simply put, not each quirk of the legacy format has been carried over to the "new" XML storage format, and certainly not into OpenOffice XML.
The long pause after "Verifying DMI Pool Data..." as the disk image downloaded aroused a dormant feeling of dread in me as I panicked and wondered why Windows wasn't loading... back in the day it meant getting yelled at for "breaking" the computer and tasked with spending the day reinstalling Windows and everybody's programs.
Nostalgia tends to make things seem better than they were. Moments like this remind me how much tech has improved over the years.
Love the experience, and it has been a while that I haven't seen a BIOS system configuration, what a throwback.
Started the Visual Basic dev env, added a button to the form, MsgBox "Hello World", and it worked.
So simple, so easy. Those were the days.
You can still have that experience with VB.NET, C#, Delphi, FreePascal, Gambas, Xojo and C++ Builder.
Instead folks go with Electron crap.
I was super happy when I found OMF 2097 in the games 2 folder. That game has insanely good music.
This is super cool! Ran into an issue though, the first time it boots perfectly, after the first refresh it loads for a bit (downloads the image again instead of from cache) and then a cachebuster URL is added and loading starts over, without ever finishing. Ideally it would just load from cache on refresh.
Exited to dos, found Bubble Bobble in GAMES directory and started to play. And that's mostly what I used to do as a kid at the times of Windows 3.11!
Excited for the inevitable "Windows 3.11 - 98K MRR" in pieter's X bio.
Can we have icons like these again please.
I started from Windows 98 and always loved the icons. They actually represented the application and purpose. These days they are more focused on looking modern. Lots of times they are not even distinguishable between each other.
C:\Windows\System32\moricons.dll is still available, you can set them on shortcuts in Properties with the "Change icon" button.
Indeed! The UI in general is more intuitive compared with mod flat bs.
Very pleased to see Abuse in there, but unfortunately it didn't load for me. I spent way too many hours in that game back in the day.
The Pentium boot process brings back memories.
I really would have liked to play Syndicate.
"For the best experience, use Chrome."
That's not Windows 3.11. That kind of thing is circa 2000, and a state none of us should want the Web to return to.
If this were a commercial project then I could understand the complaint.. but this is just a small, for-fun project and they have little motivation to put the extra effort into support for all browsers.
Bellard (yes, him) already had a working VM of Windows 2000 in the browser around a decade ago, with no specific "support for all browsers" (whatever that means):
https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...
1 reply →
I'm not really complaining; just harking back to a shitty time that is, on some commercial sites, threatening to return. Especially as Apple finally allows Chrome on iOS, eroding the main bastion against it: Safari.
it's too late, we're in chrome monoculture era for a while now
what is this feeling? oh, yes, it's damn nostalgia
Ah. Every time I look at the UI, I realize just how much the modern UI/UX degraded.
We had clear colorful icons, text labels, scrollbars, clearly distinguishable checkboxes. And now we have UI that actively promotes "rebelliousness" and "being in the know".
We also had the hotdog theme.
So we lost "whimsy" too?
Related: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251125-00/?p=11...
I was expecting it to boot to DOS and then having to typing "win"
autoexec.bat does that for you!
unless you hold shift after POST.
True story, and keep it in your hat if you know it:
I was expelled from highschool about 3 months in to my freshman year for doing this on the library computers to bypass the librarian needing to log us in, because the Mac lab printers weren't working and the report was due next period. Librarian was like "nah i'm on lunch" so i waited like 15 minutes, bypassed, printed, exited windows.
She was fuming, shaking showing printed papers with "autoexec.bat" showing an edit time[1] while she "was on lunch" and i "was the only one in there".
I actually got expelled from that school 3 times, twice for "hacking."
[1] hold shift to get to MS-DOS without restriction, edit AUTOEXEC.BAT to comment out the "security" "software" line, reboot. remove the commented line, reboot.
And then crash.
My only complaint is the esc button you need in some of the games, make the fullscreen go to the small display again
Look at how fast Excel loads. Compare to modern high-end PC with it's latest version.
I came to write exactly this comment.
The thing runs instantly. And that's in a VM in Javascript.
Office really chugged on the PCs of the time though. We can debate whether modern Excel actually delivers enough more value than historical Excel to justify being as more resource-hungry, thus slower to load, as it is. But historical Excel appears fast on modern hardware, even in emulation, because the CPU, RAM, and permanent storage have had 30 years to evolve since it was released. Contemporary 386s and 486s would not have been that snappy.
I beg to differ. I'm 55.
Let's go back to say around 1994/5. I've just got a job as the first dedicated IT bod for a pie factory near Plymouth (Devon not MA)! Win 3.11 was pretty much everywhere and was almost reliable - patching wasn't really a thing then in the MS world. By then Pentium (586) was a thing but the majority of machines were 80486, 80386s were still useful. There were also the 386/486 SX/DX and DX2 and Cyrix and so on.
The planning spreadsheets were a series of Lotus 1-2-3 jobbies with a lot of manual copy and pasting and I gradually ported it to a Excel VBA job. To cut a long story short, I was running Win311 and Excel on a Pentium 75 with 16MB RAM, IDE HDD. Excel was way quicker to start than on a modern PC running Win 11 with an SSD.
Yes, a lot of things took a while but I ended up with a finite capacity plan in VBA for an entire factory that took less than five minutes per run. That was for meat and dough prep, make, bake and wrap and dispatch for 150 odd finished product lines. It generated a labour plan as well and ran totally to forecast (which it also did). Pasties, sossie rolls etc are generally made to forecast - they take a while to get through the plant and have to be delivered into depot with enough code (shelf life) for the customer (store) to be able to sell them and the consumer to not be given a dose of the trots. As reality kicked in, you input the actual orders etc and it refined the plan.
OK not the best tool for the job but I hope I show that a spreadsheet back in the day was more than capable of doing useful things. I've just fired up LO calc on my laptop with a SSD and it took longer than I remember old school Excel starting up or perhaps the same time.
4 replies →
This is just not true. The only chugging back then was reading from disks, and the entire Office suite was only a handful of 3.5" floppies. If you had already started Excel earlier, then it was likely still cached in RAM and would start nearly instantly. If not, then it was still only a few seconds.
Now what was slow was actual computations. Like try running a big spreadsheet in Excel or counting words in a big Word document on that hardware. It takes a very long time, while on modern hardware it's nearly instant.
1 reply →
This isn't true at all, based on my experiences. Contemporary 386s were kind of slow, I guess, but these programs did not chug on a 486. I spent tons and tons of time in Excel and Access and writing VB/VBScript/macros.
They haven't released the old Excels as open source right?
Wonder if its feasible to reverse the old version using LLMs, vibecode it to run on modern platforms and then shorehorn in support for modern XLS format. At the rate LLMs are improving I hope someone will eventually partake in this challenge!
> Wonder if its feasible to reverse the old version using LLMs, vibecode it to run on modern platforms and then shorehorn in support for modern XLS format.
Oh no it won't. Photoshop PSD and the legacy Office file formats have one thing in common... they are raw dumps of the C in-memory structs representing the contents. That's how they save and load so fast [1], in contrast to the modern formats which are a bunch of XMLs in a ZIP in a trenchcoat. Unfortunately, that makes reverse engineering them not just a challenge in itself, but also reimplementing because you have to reimplement Microsoft's original engines piece by piece, quirk by quirk.
And that's before wading into the mess that is OLE or, yes, the older people will shudder, ActiveX. Or the wonders that VBA macros could achieve, including just running stuff directly from kernel32.dll. I'm reasonably sure you could import the DirectX DLLs into an Office VBA macro and implement a full blown 3D shooter engine with DirectX instead of Excel.
And that's also why conversion in either direction almost always carries loss potential, simply put, not each quirk of the legacy format has been carried over to the "new" XML storage format, and certainly not into OpenOffice XML.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
Plenty of people would have used this purely for Cardfile.
em-dosbox is a good project.
I forgot how good the old version of excel was
Just a black screen for me.
You can add Visual Basic 3 and Turbo C
Great. Attempting to use this on my 2mb ADSL is exactly like loading it from floopy disk. A true nostalgic expirence.
The long pause after "Verifying DMI Pool Data..." as the disk image downloaded aroused a dormant feeling of dread in me as I panicked and wondered why Windows wasn't loading... back in the day it meant getting yelled at for "breaking" the computer and tasked with spending the day reinstalling Windows and everybody's programs.
Nostalgia tends to make things seem better than they were. Moments like this remind me how much tech has improved over the years.
I've been playing freecell on it for the last hour or so
Freecell is actually a 32-bit Windows application running through a Wine-like compatibility layer called Win32s on 16-bit Windows.
But Microsoft Entertainment Pack 2 came first with FreeCell.
I loved messing around with this for a short time. Very nostalgic.
Some previous discussion:
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42104531
IPv6 seems broken on this website.