Running Windows 98 in the Browser (opens in new tab)

"FireFox is already running", ah, I almost forgot that. how far we've come :)

>> The Win32 environment is essentially a protected-mode DOS application"

> 95 and prior were literally running on top of DOS.

Not sure how you're gathering that the GP is contradicting this. Windows 95, 98 and Me are all architecturally the same: a protected-mode DOS app.

Running DOS from within the Windows shell is not the same as exiting or skipping the boot of the Windows graphical shell, and is running in VM86 mode (which as the GP points out existed in Windows/386 / Windows 3.0 Enhanced 386 mode) See Virtual 8086 mode for some more overview.

95 starts from dos and can exit to dos (maybe? my memory isn't reliable back then, I seem to remember it having a shut down screen and I thought reboot into dos rather than exit to dos?), but that doesn't mean dos runs under it. When a 386 mode Windows runs, it subsumes DOS; the DOS becomes virtualized on top of the Windows kernel, and when Windows exits, it puts things back to how they were.

It's messy and weird, but progress. Windows NT operates differently and I don't think ever started from DOS.

You're right, but this shell still ran in a 32 bit VM on top of DOS (16 bit).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#Architecture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_9x#Virtual_Machine_Man...

Higher resolutions (and the accompanying resource sizes) would be hell for 32-bit OSes though.

Also, it’s kind of amazing that many web pages these days are larger than Doom shareware’s zip size.

Sure, and on the mac side you've got Infinite Mac dot org where you can run System 1 through MacOS 9.0 in the browser. It's crazy to see how fast System 7.5 (which is more or less peak classic mac IMO) boots up versus System 9.0, and just how much attention to detail there was back then.

Windows NT 3.51 had driver isolation. Unicode could have been added to Windows XP.

> editing documents

Orthography and grammar checking was too slow. You had to press a button to check them, and it missed a lot of tricky cases.

Win98 had pretty great Unicode support, didn't it? Or am I confusing it with general multibyte?

Even further behind, an Amiga 500 would be more than enough for many folks.

But still, during the time of Windows 95/98 I could hardly play even a 128kbps MP3 with WinAmp in my Pentium 133MHz with 12MB of Ram where I had got rid of lots of bloatware. At the same time I could play it smoothly in Linux with a full blown desktop environment (Window Maker) running. So it was a bad performer in comparison even back then.

> There is no real reason OSes get more shitty with every version

The reason is that there’s profit to be squeezed out with all the additional bloat.

Even standard Ubuntu runs very smooth on old hardware (if it has enough memory and a ssd). I installed windows 10 on my 15 year old think pad, it was usable, but quite slow. Switched to Ubuntu and everything felt snappy again.

I was just amazed that my super old laptop could run youtube/games for my 2 year old. It had Windows but was too slow to really use.

Fedora Silverblue was too heavy, but MX Linux made that computer run like my main. No slowdowns ever. Moments like this make me wonder who/what is leading us.

Windows 2000 was memory protected, and still had very modest hardware requirements. IMO the pinnacle of Windows UX, everything after that was downhill.

Even a lot of the new APIs are quite fast. I feel that slowness creeps into frameworks two ways.

1. Bad abstraction, causing the moral equivalent of N+1 queries in UI code. For example, modify one thing, causing layout, moving something else, causing layout, moving something else, causing layout, etc., etc., until it is all recalculated and re-laid out, and then allowing the paint.

2. Hidden serialization of asynchronous processes, essentially causing tiny pauses throughout the main thread.

I think this is one reason why people are so impressed with IMGUI. They imagine that the UI code must be doing an incredible amount of work to feel so slow, but then they watch a similar IMGUI app build and display the whole UI every frame 60-120 times per second, with plenty processing power left over. But if the other frameworks weren't wasting clock time, they could feel plenty fast.

You can get a good feel for what is really slow by using a very slow computer. The original Macintosh feels snappy, but it is doing one process in black and white. It's not hard to reach 30fps. When you take System 7, and put it on a 16MHz 68020 with half a memory bus (Mac LC), and run it at 16-bit color, painting those windows takes a long time. Our trick back then was to jump to black and white when we needed to get things done quickly, then back to higher bit depths when we wanted color or eye candy.

Now we have a situation where we can output full screen 24bit color in a millisecond or less, we are waiting on other things.

This. I’m still using a couple of MFC or Win32 apps and using them is pure joy on a modern computer.

you can see this if you emerge (gentoo) or build from ports (*bsd). You try to compile vim and suddenly you're in the config page for CUPS (printer support) which then wants to know if you need Unicode support for a language you've never heard of (and if so, which font packages do you want to show it on).

Basic desktop interaction is the same as 22 years ago, yet modern desktop environments are orders of magnitude slower at performing those same basic tasks.

Things I didn't use my 1998 PC for:

* realtime collaborative spreadsheet editing

* 28 inch high definition monitor

* watching movies in HD

* playing almost lifelike games

* browsing an extremely hostile internet

* live backing up all my files

* Running large complex scripts on the same machine I can easily carry in one hand

* Running an IDE like JetBrains

I could go on. We are only doing the "same tasks" if you ignore a lot of the details.

I tried XP on a PII 333 MHz laptop with 96 MB of RAM. This laptop came with Windows 95 or 98. It still works by the way.

It ran, but it was quite slow. Windows 2000 managed better. Windows 98 even more, but internet on Windows 98, maybe not the best thing to do. Linux even more.

I can't see 233 MHz and 64 MB being reasonable minima, more like very bare minima as in "it boots".

(of course, this does not contradict anything essential from your comment)

> How would anyone expect that not to be much faster on a modern quad+ core, 4GHz system with 8GB+ RAM?

It's not a given.

For example, Windows XP may boot faster than 98 or 2K on the same hardware, because XP parallelizes and shortens some hardware initialization steps. (e.g. anything related to the network).

Win98 with file sharing spends almost a minute during boot (even from an SSD) just squeaking netbios frames.

The resolution is not 1:1.

And after Windows XP becomes an option, we can run it from within the Windows 98 Browser, possibly creating a black hole!

Getting KernelEx should not be hard to be able to get a newer Firefox version in it.

It’s one of the first screensavers in the dropdown. Worked for me, albeit slowly.