from Hacker News

The Emularity

by Mithrandir on 1/23/15, 4:33 PM with 99 comments

• by chrisduesing on 1/23/15, 5:30 PM

  "This means that somewhere, this instance needs to be connected to a proxy server, which assigns a 10.x.x.x address to the “Windows” machine, and then forwards the connections through. Basically, world’s weirdest, most hipster ISP on the face of the earth."

  I wonder if there will ever be a business case for things like this. I sit across the hall from a startup that sells mp3 gramaphones, etsy is a huge success, there are strange Kickstarter projects every day. Is nostalgia a permanent long tail phenomenon, or a fad from which people will move on?

• by fpgaminer on 1/24/15, 12:01 AM

  Jason Scott is such a weird and wonderful person. I highly recommend watching BBS: The Documentary. Episode 8 was especially interesting and moving in a way I didn't expect. I would say, in brutal honesty, the production values are (unfortunately) low, but the content is pure gold, and well makes up for it.

  So my thanks go out to Jason Scott and the small crowd of computing historians he unofficially represents. As a modern software and hardware engineer, it is both a joy to watch the old, and a comfort to know our work of today has a chance of being preserved in the years to come.

• by csl on 1/23/15, 5:29 PM

  If anyone is interested, I just wrote a simple guide on how to get your own DOS programs up and running with em-dosbox: https://csl.name/post/em-dosbox/

  Em-dosbox and emscripten are really amazing projects. An emulator is cross-compiled to JavaScript, which is then JITed in your browser's js VM. It's not only amazing that it works, but also that it runs pretty well (compared to native dosbox, it's only a little bit slower on some programs).

• by narag on 1/24/15, 2:32 AM

  it’s running inside the EM-DOSBOX system, since Windows 3.x was essentially a very complicated program running inside DOS. (When Windows 95 came out, a big deal was made by Gates and Co. that it was the “end” of the DOS prompt, although they were seriously off by a number of years.)

  Nitpicking just a little bit: Windows 3 didn't run inside DOS. Maybe "on top of it" if you want to put it that way, but not "inside".

  It changed the processor and graphic modes and when shut down it reverted to the prompt. But by no means was it "just a big DOS program".

  Guess what: Windows 95 also was a program running "on top" of DOS. That was somewhat hidden, but I remember clearly that I booted to DOS and then executed either Windows 3 or Windows 95 (I was programming a compatible 16/32 bits application). There was some tweaking needed but it worked nicely.

• by swalsh on 1/23/15, 9:08 PM

  I'm waiting for the day that the wikipedia entry on windows 95 let's you load up windows 95.

• by platz on 1/23/15, 5:25 PM

  > It turns out a number of fundamental aspects of The Web have changed since this time.

  I wish they went into more detail what exactly changed and why these browsers no longer work, unless it was the PPP protocol they mentioned that is causing the issue.

• by BenoitEssiambre on 1/23/15, 5:18 PM

  Imagine if they get to windows XP and ie8. We will never get rid of them!

• by js2 on 1/23/15, 6:19 PM

  I recall running Windows 3.11 on a Mac using the earliest versions of Connectix Virtual PC in the late 90s. It was so slow as to be unusable. And today we can run Windows 3.11 in a browser. Mind-boggling.

• by alexvoda on 1/23/15, 10:59 PM

  This prediction is becoming true day by day:

  https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

• by 300bps on 1/23/15, 5:27 PM

  My first thought on reading this is that we can't be that far off from running MAME and every classic arcade game in a browser. Googled it and sure enough - it's already here courtesy of the Internet Archive:

  https://archive.org/details/internetarcade

• by ianopolous on 1/23/15, 7:34 PM

  There's another JS port of dosbox (via Java and GWT) - jsdosbox here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jsdosbox/

  with a playable demo of doom here: https://jsdosbox.appspot.com/

• by marcosdumay on 1/23/15, 5:31 PM

  Who creates an emilator for Windows 3.11 and doesn't install the ski game?

• by kalleboo on 1/24/15, 4:31 AM

  Now I'm imagining pointing this thing not at a proxy that accesses the live web but one which picks a date in the wayback machine and relays the state of the web at the time the browser came out...

• by code_duck on 1/23/15, 7:47 PM

  I went through the period of nostalgia and fascination the author exhibits years ago with Amiga, c64 and dos emulation and virtual machines.

  It's impressive and convenient that this runs in a browser, but does itreally change anything about emulation? We've had this capability for windows, mac and Linux for years which covers about every platform with a browser. I suppose it's convenient if you wanted to emulate windows 3.1 on your iOS device.

• by orbitur on 1/23/15, 5:23 PM

  They should try getting a more modern browser on there. If I remember correctly, while running my hand-me-down Gateway 2000 with Windows 3.11 in 1998, I managed to get Internet Explorer 3 or 4 installed after I downloaded it at a friend's house.

• by arohner on 1/23/15, 9:07 PM

  Ok, I understand how you'd run a CPU emulator written in JS, in a browser, but how do these things get raw socket access?

  If you're running in a browser, all the network access you get is HTTP AJAX, right?

• by inglor on 1/23/15, 7:00 PM

  This looks like a weaker version of http://copy.sh/v24 with emscripten. Still a very interesting development though

• by nsxwolf on 1/23/15, 5:24 PM

  Is there a link to a live demo?

• by transfire on 1/24/15, 12:20 AM

  Windows 3.1 was the pinnacle of Windows -- seriously I think they went in the wrong direction with 95 and we may never recover.

• by vegabook on 1/23/15, 7:11 PM

  K so JS is the new de-facto interpreted machine-Latin. The lingua franca.

  Is there something else I'm missing here? We've known that there is a decent mapping from X86 assembly to a subset of javascript for a number of years now. You can even run the entire OCaml stack in the browser, or Doom, or Quake... etc. What's next? Wordperfect in the browser? Visicalc? This is clever and kudos to the guys, but how is this advancing what we already know?

  Javascript is fast and flexible. The browser is a credible platform technologically. We can treat it like a VM. Yep...Got it. More than three years ago. https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/graphs/contributors