by hluska on 3/2/20, 2:26 PM
My four year old doesn’t believe that computers ever looked or loaded like this. Hacker News is ‘farty’ and ‘telling stories’ today.
Edit - The four year old doesn’t believe that I went to school. This is going to be quite the ride to daycare...
by syx on 3/2/20, 3:26 PM
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.
[1] https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-gui-websites
by 4cao on 3/2/20, 3:32 PM
No matter how hard I try, can't find a way to trigger the BSoD. There must be a way, will keep looking.
Edit: Seems it's supposed to crash on its own at random intervals for no apparent reason. It's really just like the original.
by 72deluxe on 3/2/20, 4:47 PM
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.
I miss KDE2's look TBH.
by ChrisArchitect on 3/2/20, 2:45 PM
by Atheb on 3/2/20, 3:08 PM
by grawprog on 3/2/20, 5:42 PM
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.
by nojvek on 3/3/20, 1:42 AM
Should remove the closing animations. They break the nostalgia.
lol! lena and virtual girl. You do realize there are women on this site right? may be have it a bit less bro-ey ?
by sterlind on 3/2/20, 7:18 PM
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?
by cstross on 3/2/20, 2:41 PM
Oh dear Cthulhu, I'd totally forgotten about the Hamsterdance!
by theandrewbailey on 3/2/20, 2:52 PM
My vapors are waved.
by calmconviction on 3/2/20, 9:00 PM
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
by aargh_aargh on 3/2/20, 11:45 AM
Nitpick: Turbo C in DOSBox doesn't work by default. Options - Directories point to C:\TC\ whereas Turbo C is actually installed in C:\.
by amiantos on 3/2/20, 4:57 PM
"Safari is teh new Internet Explorer"
huh
by tartoran on 3/2/20, 5:48 PM
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..
by A_No_Name_Mouse on 3/2/20, 6:06 PM
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.
by fireattack on 3/2/20, 6:21 PM
by aliswe on 3/2/20, 3:42 PM
Honestly using this on a phone is not very far from the android ui.
by lqs469 on 3/2/20, 3:23 PM
Even there is a Half-life 3 and it's loading forever.
by alexdumitru on 3/2/20, 3:56 PM
This version of Minesweeper seems a bit hard to beat.
by interweb on 3/3/20, 1:16 AM
by bastawhiz on 3/3/20, 1:13 AM
Looking at the console, it's disappointing to see it trying to connect to (the now defunct) Coinhive
by weci2i on 3/3/20, 12:53 AM
by tehlike on 3/3/20, 1:03 AM
I forgot defrag was a thing. Whenever computer felt slow, run it to have your placebo.
by thinkloop on 3/2/20, 6:17 PM
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.
by neogodless on 3/2/20, 4:29 PM
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...
by ebeip90 on 3/2/20, 9:10 PM
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.
by gwbas1c on 3/2/20, 2:54 PM
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.
by Emendo on 3/2/20, 10:01 PM
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.
by smukherjee19 on 3/2/20, 3:41 PM
I found the Castle Gafa game... interesting, to say the least.
by dfee on 3/2/20, 5:04 PM
Open “Solitude” click “Game” -> “Yeah” and follow the instructions. You won’t be disappointed.
> click and drag anywhere on the game to see the fun, thanks to mr doob
by unnouinceput on 3/2/20, 6:15 PM
Half-Life 3....confirmed
That one cracked me and my boy. Awesome.
by have_faith on 3/2/20, 2:33 PM
Progress Quest is a surprisingly engaging game
by signaru on 3/3/20, 3:41 AM
Amazing! It would be fun if they could somehow integrate jspaint.app which is a very close replica of 90s MS Paint.
by MayeulC on 3/3/20, 12:11 AM
Doesn't work in a private browsing window on Firefox. It could be that local storage is disabled, IIRC?
by kempbellt on 3/2/20, 7:30 PM
Very cool. Technology has come far.
Sidenote: Is it just me, or is the minesweeper game designed to make you lose every time?
by stuartd on 3/2/20, 3:51 PM
Oh, this takes me back a long time. I kept a game of Progress Quest open for far longer than I should have.
by vcoelho on 3/2/20, 6:30 PM
Wow, I don't know how I just missed modern browsers being able to run Game Boy emulators.
by ComodoHacker on 3/2/20, 3:21 PM
In the Trollbox chat log I see
>~anonymous is now known as wuhan-clan
Is this added lately? If so, its very convincing.
by jasoneckert on 3/2/20, 8:04 PM
This website has totally destroyed my productivity for the day. Thanks for that! :D
by SirLotsaLocks on 3/2/20, 4:03 PM
Is there a current gen operating system that maintains this appearence style?
by timplant on 3/3/20, 1:29 PM
Thinking of days when I was a student playing wolfenstein 3d...
by lichenwarp on 3/2/20, 9:12 PM
Where is Visual Basic 6 enterprise when you're 13.
by DerWOK on 3/2/20, 9:41 PM
Most fun was: launching Brain Sweeper! ROFL!!1!
by anthilemoon on 3/2/20, 2:28 PM
The trollbox is probably the scariest part.
by ryanmercer on 3/2/20, 10:24 PM
Oops, lenna.png is definitely NSFW.
by jonnycomputer on 3/2/20, 6:28 PM
OS in a browser, and its snappy.
by Yhippa on 3/2/20, 9:19 PM
Doom works!
by ryanmercer on 3/2/20, 7:12 PM
Are you trying to get me fired? I started playing solitaire and was like wait, you're at work dummy.
by dbg31415 on 3/2/20, 9:04 PM
Lotta memories here. Thanks.
by PatrolX on 3/2/20, 7:45 PM
So good, so very very good!
by parasanti on 3/2/20, 4:08 PM
Defrag works as expected.
by ouid on 3/2/20, 11:13 PM
always upvote windows93
by mshockwave on 3/2/20, 5:16 PM
I like the Half-life 3
by splatcollision on 3/2/20, 4:43 PM
This is so superbad
by bigyanshr on 3/2/20, 3:21 PM
Good old days :D
