I ran Disk Defragmenter, just out of curiousity. The drive actually has some sectors marked as bad.
Running Windows 98 in the Browser
101–110 of 161 posts
Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strange. I used a dual boot configuration back in the day and found the Windows experience a lot more efficient than the Linux desktop then. It was less stable and secure of course, but Linux drivers were not really optimized and if you wanted a comparable desktop feel you needed something like KDE which needed a lot more memory and felt sluggish compared to Windows. Also, there was rapid development in MP3 decoders…
> I used a dual boot configuration back in the day and found the Windows experience a lot more efficient than the Linux desktop then. That was often due to driver support, some hardware not performing as quickly (or sometimes not being as stable) under generic OSS drivers compared to their behaviour with the manufacturer's proprietary binaries (which were quite likely not available for Linux at all). It could be very…
It was also the awful amount of indirection of X(Free86/org) which made sure you had to jump through hoops to get anything on the screen. Even with accelerated hardware X doesn't feel as fast as Windows/macOS due to the insane amount of round-trips for perceived 'network transparency' which doesn't work that great and almost nobody uses.
I find it very disappointing some people are still fighting Wayland which, while not perfect, at least tries to get Linux desktops graphics stack 'on par' with macOS versions from 20 years ago...
Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser
#103The thing that always strikes me with these kinds of demos is how absurdly efficient old OSs were / had to be. It's obviously not an apples to apples comparison, as modern operating systems have to handle a lot more, but even Windows XP (which handled a lot of the same basic Internet browsing tasks as I still use now!) is almost comically fast on modern hardware.
The core OS APIs still allow writing fast and snappy applications, but most apps nowadays are not written this way. Apps are using generic libraries that bring "the gorilla and the jungle" with them, browsers are relying on a JIT to draw their own UI, etc.
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.
Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser
#104Bravo! Was there anyone used the 'Briefcase' back in the day? I'd forgotten about that. In fact I got so in the zone that I pressed ALT-F4 to close Win98 notepad and shut down my whole web browser instead!
The briefcase was mostly for storing files that would be synced between devices. The general idea was to allow loading contacts and documents onto your PDA, editing stuff on the go, and syncing it back.
Sync primarily happened via either a hardwired serial connection or wirelessly via infrared. The infrared sync worked, but was finicky and required that the infrared sensors on your laptop and PDA be directly facing each other.
I only played with this after I'd graduated and started making enough money that I could buy used PDA's just to see what they were capable of.
Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even further behind, an Amiga 500 would be more than enough for many folks.
The memory footprint of workbench was incredibly low. A base alpine image with no support for any graphics is several times that size. What are we doing?
> What are we doing?
Making use of what is cheap (hardware (CPU/ram) and network bandwidth) while avoiding to use what is expensive: programmers, tech guy helping you with an upgrade or a troubled windows install.
Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a lot more to it than just increasing the resolution. Graphics, animations, font rendering quality, huge images, the list goes on.
Most of that is GPU-accelerated anyway so the OS / CPU doesn't need to do much beyond telling the GPU what to do.
That's clearly not true.
I can run a full virtual music studio on my Mac, with tens of channels, each with a collection of plugins, and multiple samples and audio files streaming off SSD at the same time.
None of that is GPU accelerated - except maybe the UI, which is split across three 4k monitors
On Windows 95 I could barely play a single WAV at once, and a dual monitor system was an exotic luxury.
Hardware has gotten a lot faster, and the software can do more without crashing. (Mostly.)
The real problem has been the move to browser+cloud for productivity applications. The OS is a front end for the browser, which is a front end for remote compute. This is hugely slow and inefficient compared to making everything work locally, and perhaps including some cloud-ish hooks for sharing.
Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even functionally it's very comical because of how we were able to do on Win98 (even 95) almost everything we are doing today: editing documents, browsing the web (with images), playing games, watching videos, printing documents, listening to music. The only functional improvements I can note over two decades are: Unicode support, higher resolution of everything (from hardware to content), and system reliability than…
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.
1) if you're just referring to pointer size, wouldn't it be mostly a matter of computer hardware and recompiling to 64bit exes? Functionally it's the same
2) there's less cluster and more optimization. Why would it suffer at anything?
Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser
#108The thing that always strikes me with these kinds of demos is how absurdly efficient old OSs were / had to be. It's obviously not an apples to apples comparison, as modern operating systems have to handle a lot more, but even Windows XP (which handled a lot of the same basic Internet browsing tasks as I still use now!) is almost comically fast on modern hardware.
Even functionally it's very comical because of how we were able to do on Win98 (even 95) almost everything we are doing today: editing documents, browsing the web (with images), playing games, watching videos, printing documents, listening to music. The only functional improvements I can note over two decades are: Unicode support, higher resolution of everything (from hardware to content), and system reliability than…
> 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.
Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main downside is that those OSes were also really quick to hack, and the smallest problem bluescreen'd the system and lost all your work. But you can get a reasonably close experience with Linux or the BSDs and a simple GUI environment like the *box window managers. They're modern and snappy even on things like older generation RasPis.
Windows 2000 was memory protected, and still had very modest hardware requirements. IMO the pinnacle of Windows UX, everything after that was downhill.
It is true, yet multi language support was near non existent, you had a special version for CJK, digging the registry was a common thing, good luck trying to read a linux partition and an emulation of a bash shell would be the best you'd get.
All in all I respect the nostalgy, and see how many people would still be fine with these restrictions. I personally wouldn't want to go back to these day short of being paid a few trillions.
Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of that is GPU-accelerated anyway so the OS / CPU doesn't need to do much beyond telling the GPU what to do.
That's clearly not true. I can run a full virtual music studio on my Mac, with tens of channels, each with a collection of plugins, and multiple samples and audio files streaming off SSD at the same time. None of that is GPU accelerated - except maybe the UI, which is split across three 4k monitors On Windows 95 I could barely play a single WAV at once, and a dual monitor system was an exotic luxury. Hardware has got…
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