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Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

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Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#151

Post by 72deluxe »

This is really impressive, and also brings back waves of nostalgia as I used to use Windows 98 (and 95 and 3.11 before that) as my daily driver.

I like how the cloud icons at the side of Explorer when not in classic mode still are drawn with a white background even if you change the colour scheme.

On a real machine, when I look at this old system I realise how little we have moved on in UI terms or the basic needs and requirements of a computer. You could do 99% of what you need to do on an old computer, other than duff website rendering and horrible security and power usage.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#152

Post by Elv13 »

taneq wrote: post #136
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…

Wow. My first semester of computer science had me studying fuckin' Gofer.

It was a technical school with very practical teachers. The lack of "theorists" probably helped a lot. Most of them were either from the video game industry or 80's embedded developers. In Quebec (Canada), a technical school teacher unlikely is to have a PhD. Technical schools and universities are 2 different "level". You can take technical school (CEGEP) as a pre-university degree (or you can end there and get the equivalent of an associate degree). When taking a CS one instead of science, you "lose" 1 year, but it is much more fun. Too bad they replaced the system programming courses with web ones a couple of years ago.

All that to say that sometime, having real industry veterans as teachers really influence the teaching point of view.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#153

Post by stephenboyd »

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.

We covered it in the first quarter of the CS program at The Evergreen State College. After a few weeks of being introduced to digital logic, each student had to draw (with an application called Logisim) a simulated simple-as-possible Von Neumann machine up from logic gates and wires. Then we had to write short math programs for them directly into the RAM. Fortunately, Logisim lets you save components as something like functions or macros so it wasn't too repetitive. This project demo video by someone who took the same course shows what the result looks like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8qEz4DwFIg

It was challenging, but it was awesome (and finding that video to illustrate my comment is a blast of nostalgia). It wasn't any harder than most other CS or other sciences courses. And after digital logic, the other CS topics aren't really prerequisite or especially helpful in learning how simple processors work. I really appreciated getting straight to the foundations of how computers work and building up from there.

It wasn't like emulating x86 in javascript, but it was CPU internals. Up until I read your comment, I just assumed this was standard CS stuff.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#154

Post by i336_ »

agumonkey wrote: post #143
tomc1985 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I miss the shitty machinery of win9x days[1]. The weird part is that I was deep into CGI, and compositors made so much sense to allow for all kind of graphical operations; yet.. I miss the refreshed icons, blinking cursor .. as if I was one to one with that simple machine. That's very subjective, I'm in a minimalist passeist phase. [1] Except for the non isolated driver model.

> I'm in a minimalist passeist phase.

> ...one to one with that simple machine.

Recommendation: Forth (cf. colorForth)

Warning: Save snapshot of current mental state/perspective/worldview first, to guarantee sustained mental health :P

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#155

Post by stephenboyd »

copy wrote: post #29
zero-g wrote: post #14

Where does one start with such thing? I mean, where do I read how to emulate CPU (or at least how CPU works, so I would be able to come up with how to emulate it by myself), how does PS/2 work, how to boot an image from BIOS?

First you write a disassembler, then an interpreter for 16 bit mode. At that point you can already almost run FreeDOS. Here are some resources: http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2014/readings/i386/toc.htm The official intel manuals http://sandpile.org/ http://ref.x86asm.net/geek.html http://stanislavs.org/helppc/idx_hardware.html http://www.ctyme.com/intr/int.htm http://wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page

If the reference manuals are overwhelming, I'd recommend to start by reading Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold. It covers how computers work for a general audience, from logic gates and boolean algebra, up to assembly, opcodes on the Intel 8080 processor, and how operating systems work. It was one of the most consequential books I've read, and I'd recommend it to both professional programmers and anyone else who is intellectually curious.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#156

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

danjayh wrote: post #126

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.

The control panel in newer versions could still be that clean if Microsoft hadn't tried to reinvent it three times (XP, Vista, 8).

Of course, the 9x control panel is, in a way, a reinvention of the 3.x control panel. It's just a very clean one, because the 3.x control panel was a window full of icons, and the 9x control panel is an Explorer window full of icons.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#157

Post by taneq »

unwind wrote: post #149
taneq wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. My first semester of computer science had me studying fuckin' Gofer.

As in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29 , right, the precursor to HTTP?

Nope, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gofer_%28programming_language%..., the neutered Haskell clone.

Don't get me wrong, I certainly think that functional programming has its place in the world, but as a first year uni student all fired up about finally learning "real" programming after years of teaching myself (back before the internet laid everything out on a platter), I was not impressed.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#158

Post by agumonkey »

i336_ wrote: post #154
agumonkey wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the shitty machinery of win9x days[1]. The weird part is that I was deep into CGI, and compositors made so much sense to allow for all kind of graphical operations; yet.. I miss the refreshed icons, blinking cursor .. as if I was one to one with that simple machine. That's very subjective, I'm in a minimalist passeist phase. [1] Except for the non isolated driver model.

> I'm in a minimalist passeist phase. > ...one to one with that simple machine. Recommendation: Forth (cf. colorForth) Warning: Save snapshot of current mental state/perspective/worldview first, to guarantee sustained mental health :P

I regularly scan (ansi|gnu|color|*)Forth webpages. Thinking Forth is on my mental shelf for so long. ML and Lisps keep delaying reading it.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#159

Post by rhplus »

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.

Microsoft spun its wheels a lot with file-syncing in the mid-2000s. Aside from the stuff coming from Office (Groove, etc) and Windows (folder-shadowing, BITS, etc), there was a slew of inter-related products in the consumer space starting with the acquisition of FolderShare. By the time DropBox launched, it had become Mesh.com, with PC-to-PC syncing and online storage, but thanks to internal competition and constant rebranding/repositioning, it slowly became deprecated and subsumed by SkyDrive/OneDrive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Mesh

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#160

Post by toyg »

taneq wrote: post #157
unwind wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29 , right, the precursor to HTTP?

Nope, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gofer_%28programming_language%... , the neutered Haskell clone. Don't get me wrong, I certainly think that functional programming has its place in the world, but as a first year uni student all fired up about finally learning "real" programming after years of teaching myself (back before the internet laid everything out on a platter), I was not impressed.

Eh, same with me and Scheme.

I don't think functional paradigms can really be appreciated by 1st/2nd year undergrads. At that age you are fundamentally impatient to make your mark in a practical sense, your approach will be instinctively imperative. You have to hit the wall (scaling / parallelism / thread management / complexity etc) before you start to really appreciate the upsides of functional paradigms.

Unfortunately, a lot of professors are actually terrible educators (after all, they did not get there by teaching but by researching) and think the learning process is as linear as house-building: "place bricks here and there so that your next row will be this way and that way". They also think people should enjoy programming for programming's sake, whereas a lot of people are motivated by a creative process driven by outcomes.

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