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Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

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Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#111

Post by toyg »

cbd1984 wrote: post #106
Elv13 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in 2007, my first semester in a technical CS school had plenty of assembly, binary, MMU emulation, OSI / TCP/IP, boolean math and so on. I know this is mostly gone at this point, but it should not. The fundamentals are essentials. I often meet people who are totally clueless how a computer work and have CS degrees. "How can you do C, it is so old? By now, we must have invented faster languages. Computers changed…

Those aren't the fundamentals of CS. The fundamentals of CS are data structures and algorithms, as the Good Book says. Hardware is important, practically, but don't let practicality blind you to the actual core of the field: Practicality has a way of becoming obsolete, and an actual education is for life.

Meh. It's like saying that the fundamentals of film-making are writing and acting -- except writers and actors are nothing without an actual camera, and if you don't know how to place the camera and how to cut film produced by such camera, you will never get a film done. Cameras change, but you will never have a camera that miraculously materializes in all the right places to take exactly the shots you imagined. In the same way, some things will never change on the hardware side: you will always have inputs, outputs, memory, storage, human interfaces, power management, booting and so on.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#112

Post by bcook »

runn1ng wrote: post #66

Doesn't work on my Android phone, in Chrome. But I didn't expect it to :) Edit: for what it's worth, FreeDOS boots there. No way to put in keyboard input though.

Booted and works fine on my Nexus 9 running Chrome and Android Marshmallow (CyanogenMod 13).

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#113

Post by mwcampbell »

toyg wrote: post #104
normac wrote: post #78

This is such a great demonstration of both how fast JS engines have become in the browser, and how much less efficient native software has become overall. Running on top of an x86 emulator in JavaScript , it's still faster to pop open a file browser and click around than it is on some modern smartphones.

Most modern smartphones run Android, which means they have a bastardized Java VM between your "native code" and actual metal... not unlike having a JS VM. It's not that "native software" has become less efficient, but rather that it is slowly disappearing.

As of Android 5.0, the Android Runtime (ART) compiles Dex bytecode ahead of time to native code. That probably still isn't as efficient as C++ or the like, because there's still a garbage collector, and Java methods are virtual by default.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#114

Post by lugg »

te_platt wrote: post #83

Very nice. Although opening IE and trying to go to http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98 gave an error. Go figure...

It doesn't have internet.

You might be able to compile the js down to a single copy paste into a file then load that in ie.

I'm going to guess it won't work in IE from 1998 though.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#115

Post by drewcrawford »

normac wrote: post #78

This is such a great demonstration of both how fast JS engines have become in the browser, and how much less efficient native software has become overall. Running on top of an x86 emulator in JavaScript , it's still faster to pop open a file browser and click around than it is on some modern smartphones.

You might think it's a great demonstration if you try it in a desktop browser.

Meanwhile, on actual mobile hardware, the performance is so atrocious it's completely unusable.

No knock on the implementors of course. But the idea that this demo has some deep insight about the performance of native smartphone software is just inaccurate.

http://cl.ly/2O0L3t290s37

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#116

Post by hanief »

Minesweeper! Ah, the nostalgia.

A note: the mouse position and acceleration seems to not be mapped correctly. It is often separated away from my local desktop mouse position. Maybe because the screen resolution is different?

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#117

Post by tempestn »

hanief wrote: post #116

Minesweeper! Ah, the nostalgia. A note: the mouse position and acceleration seems to not be mapped correctly. It is often separated away from my local desktop mouse position. Maybe because the screen resolution is different?

I'm having the same issue. It makes it difficult to do anything, because I would need to move my actual mouse pointer past the edge of my monitor to get to any of the icons or start menu with the virtual mouse.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#118

Post by Svenskunganka »

hanief wrote: post #116

Minesweeper! Ah, the nostalgia. A note: the mouse position and acceleration seems to not be mapped correctly. It is often separated away from my local desktop mouse position. Maybe because the screen resolution is different?

Click the lock mouse button

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#119

Post by gwbas1c »

tempestn wrote: post #117
hanief wrote: post #116

Minesweeper! Ah, the nostalgia. A note: the mouse position and acceleration seems to not be mapped correctly. It is often separated away from my local desktop mouse position. Maybe because the screen resolution is different?

I'm having the same issue. It makes it difficult to do anything, because I would need to move my actual mouse pointer past the edge of my monitor to get to any of the icons or start menu with the virtual mouse.

You gotta lock the mouse. Most likely, something's emulating a physical mouse input, which is inexact.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#120

Post by cbd1984 »

toyg wrote: post #111
cbd1984 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren't the fundamentals of CS. The fundamentals of CS are data structures and algorithms, as the Good Book says. Hardware is important, practically, but don't let practicality blind you to the actual core of the field: Practicality has a way of becoming obsolete, and an actual education is for life.

Meh. It's like saying that the fundamentals of film-making are writing and acting -- except writers and actors are nothing without an actual camera, and if you don't know how to place the camera and how to cut film produced by such camera, you will never get a film done. Cameras change, but you will never have a camera that miraculously materializes in all the right places to take exactly the shots you imagined. In t…

The difference is that when people talk about hardware, they're talking about the equivalent of film, not abstract "this is central to being a camera which works with visible-spectrum light" concepts.

> you will always have [...]

> memory, storage

First, making a distinction between memory and storage is not an "at all times, in all places" kind of thing. It's more "this is what we do now, in the past, on some systems, it was different, and it may be different in the future" kind of thing. Single-level storage is not currently popular, but it was in the past and may yet come back. It already has, in some limited contexts.

Second, we've already seen home system storage go from paper tape to magnetic tape to magnetic disk to metallic magnetic disk to solid-state NAND Flash or close equivalent. Each has vastly different performance characteristics and details in every detail.

> human interfaces

I'm sure there are some iron-clad universals in HID. I don't know which of those translate from CLIs to touch-screens to gestural interfaces to speech recognition to pupil tracking to...

> power management, booting

Two things which have changed quite a bit even in the lifetime of "vaguely IBM PC-derived" desktop computers, and even moreso if you widen your scope up and down the power curve to include handheld systems and, you know, Real Computers What Do Real Work.

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