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Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

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Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#121

Post by normac »

drewcrawford wrote: post #115
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

I didn't mean to compare native mobile apps to web apps (though I see now how it could be read that way). I'm talking about native software in general. I chose smartphones for the comparison because they're the most notorious about being slow, even as their hardware performance approaches what PCs were like just a few years ago. Although even some desktop apps manage to be as janky and dog slow as almost anything from the Win98 era, e.g. iTunes until a couple of years ago. By contrast, the cheapest Third World market smartphone would run Win98 apps blinding fast.

In general there's an arms race between hardware getting faster and native developers getting more and more lazy about efficiency. On the desktop, the hardware is finally winning--it's just too damn fast. Hopefully that will happen with smartphones too.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#122

Post by derefr »

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…

Those would also be the fundamentals of theatre, though, and film as a medium is essentially defined by its divergence from theatre. The fundamentals of film are cinematography and editing, but even this is theoretical compared to the craft of film-making. Just as CS includes the behaviors of Von Neumann machines with tapes, which is abstract compared to the science of e.g. processor die doping.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#123

Post by orbitingpluto »

tomc1985 wrote: post #84
tkinom wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it is a very cool demo. Is there anyway I can find out the call flow of this JS program? Like to see the actual dynamic call flow graph instead of just simple static flow analysis output.

That's because the Win98 code is that much simpler. It has less to do with speed and more to do with complexity. Your phone is doing all sorts of weird shit behind your back as you poke about. Stuff that it's not supposed to be doing if app-makers were actually respectful of their users... On that note, why does that crap take so long on smartphones anyway?

Had a client who later wanted me to do add all sorts of nasty things to an Android app template that I had made for him: Locking out primary navigation buttons, partially replacing the home app, spying on the user, and the capability to send out very expensive SMS texts and auto dial long distance phone calls. Unfortunately I was unavailable to do the addons he wanted, despite him asking repeatedly over the next 18 months. Never trust an Android app...

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#124

Post by userbinator »

copy wrote: post #76
jhallenworld wrote: post #72

But is the A20 gate being properly emulated? :) I know a verification engineer who left AMD because he was tired of dealing with the ancient testbench which checked the ancient hardware. The browser should run in the hypervisor and provide a real hardware virtual machine. Provide both ARM and x86, one is emulated and one is real.

It's not. I haven't come across any software that relied on it.

Very old (as in pre-386, or even pre-286) DOS software, written for the PC and only the PC, might depend on it. If I remember correctly, archive.org has a whole section devoted to ancient DOS software, so you might find something in there.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#125

Post by Spooky23 »

toyg wrote: post #107

"My Briefcase" could have been Dropbox, 10 years earlier, if only 1) it could work decently, which it never did, and 2) had an option to sync to MS servers. Bandwidth was an issue at home, back then, but for offices it would have been fine.

In the age of 4.3 GB drives that cost $750, unlikely.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#126

Post by danjayh »

Windows before 30 years of updates that were created with a need to maintain backwards compatibility feels so cohesive. I mean, that control panel is just so clean.

Also, would be interested in seeing the orginal Win 95 (before OSR2). It was way way faster than win 98.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#127

Post by danjayh »

jcoffland wrote: post #62
toyg wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bologna, Italy (from the school of Science, not Engineering). At the time (16+ years ago, under prof. Renzo Davoli), the introductory "Computer Architecture" course [1] was almost entirely dedicated to CPU architecture, including building basic ones (IIRC). To be fair, I did drop out a year later :) [1] http://www.unibo.it/en/teaching/degree-programmes/study-plan...

This kind of course (computer architecture) is typical of the cross CS/EE requirements and can usually be taken during any year of an undergraduate degree in CS. Prerequisites are minimal if any.

I taught that class once. It does have some prerequisites, but not a ton. I think it could be taken as early as second year, first semester at that particular school.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#128

Post by eru »

0xffff2 wrote: post #25
toyg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

University courses? I'm pretty sure CPUs were a huge part of my first year of CS.

Learning about CPU internals was a huge part of your first year in CS? Where did you go to school? At my school and every other school I'm remotely familiar with, the knowledge needed to emulate a CPU would be covered in upper division computer engineering courses, and not covered by CS undergrads at all, certainly not in their first year.

I was equally shocked at the state of CS education at University of New South Wales here in Australia. They don't seem to cover many fundamentals (like CPU, algorithms and data structures, operating systems) compared to what I am used to in Europe. Either not at all in the undergrad curriculum or only very late.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#129

Post by z1mm32m4n »

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?

My first laptop was a 10 year old hand me down Windows 95 laptop (literally, as old as me) that I used just to play Space Cadet Pinball. I can't believe they took it out of Windows 98; what a great game haha

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#130

Post by sotojuan »

eru wrote: post #128
0xffff2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning about CPU internals was a huge part of your first year in CS? Where did you go to school? At my school and every other school I'm remotely familiar with, the knowledge needed to emulate a CPU would be covered in upper division computer engineering courses, and not covered by CS undergrads at all, certainly not in their first year.

I was equally shocked at the state of CS education at University of New South Wales here in Australia. They don't seem to cover many fundamentals (like CPU, algorithms and data structures, operating systems) compared to what I am used to in Europe. Either not at all in the undergrad curriculum or only very late.

In my US school we don't even write our own compiler in programming languages class. Europeans seem to learn a ton more.
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