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Running Windows 98 in the Browser

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Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#121

Post by calamari4065 »

gus_massa wrote: post #108
gwervc wrote: post #20

Earlier 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…

> 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.

That's really just because the techniques we use now weren't developed then. I'd bet good money that a port of a modern spell checker would perform beautifully on an old 98 machine.

It's easy to confuse the bad performance of old software with the hardware it's on. But really a lot of the trouble is that the solutions we had to software problems back then are primitive and naive compared to the current state of the art. There's no reason that current software design practices can't massively improve older systems.

Hell, just try installing a modern Linux on an ancient PC, you'll see what I mean. Even considering that the hardware is physically slower, your experience is much, much closer to modern computing than 98 could ever hope to achieve.

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#122

Post by calamari4065 »

userbinator wrote: post #97

Run a DOS box inside that, and you actually have a VM running inside that VM. Win9x (and I believe it started with Windows/386) are based on a hypervisor architecture with minimal protections. The Win32 environment is essentially a protected-mode DOS application that also runs its own application format, and is itself a VM, along with each "DOS box" that gets created.

95 and prior were literally running on top of DOS. If you exited the Windows environment, you were left on a real DOS shell. 98 is when they changed to what you're describing, AFAIK

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#123

Post by moron4hire »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #8
creshal wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but how is it surprising that an old OS built for late 90's hardware runs fast on 2020's hardware? I'm failing to see the surprise. Isn't it a a given that old SW runs faster on modern HW when you factor in how far HW evolved since then.

I think the big question everyone has in mind when they make comments about old OSes running fast on modern hardware is, "what is the juice that we are getting for the squeeze?"

It's not just that Win98 runs faster on modern hardware. It's that it does the same--or at least similar, as far as the user is concerned--tasks as Win11, but faster.

That leaves a gaping hole of "what was so important to add to the OS that it warrants slower interactions at every turn".

I opened the settings app on my work computer running Win10 the other day and it took a good 5 seconds before it showed up and painted. On Win-anything-less-than-or-equal-to-7, the settings window opened immediately and navigating to different settings was also immediate.

So what is Win10/11 doing?

And Linux isn't immune to the bloat. It is still smaller/faster than Windows, but it has managed to stay within a constant factor of Windows all this time. Modern Linux is significantly fatter than 20, even 10 year old Windows.

If the answer were "corpos gonna bloat", what's Linux's excuse? Operating systems across the board have gotten bigger and slower over time, for little visible benefit, and nobody has a coherent answer for why.

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#124

Post by juunpp »

nippoo wrote: post #3

The 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.

You're right, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. The comparison is unfair to Windows 11 running on bare metal. You'd have to emulate 10 browser stacks recursively and then put Windows 98 on that to get a reasonable baseline.

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#125

Post by moron4hire »

blowski wrote: post #27
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Why is it surprising that an old OS built for late 90's hardware runs "comically fast" on 2020's hardware? Just look at XP system requirements: - Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended) - At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is reco…

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 ignor…

  > \* realtime collaborative spreadsheet editing
  > \* live backing up all my files
These are broadband adoption and bandwidth issues and don't explain why the OS has grown. We had real-time networked apps in 1998. We had networked file-sharing and backups.

  > \* 28 inch high definition monitor
  > \* watching movies in HD
  > \* playing almost lifelike games
  > \* Running large complex scripts on the same machine I can easily carry in one hand
  > \* Running an IDE like JetBrains
These are hardware scaling issues and don't explain why the OS has grown. And we had IDEs in 1998.

  > \* browsing an extremely hostile internet
Better sandboxing of the browser explains (though only partially) why the browser has grown, but doesn't explain why the OS has. If anything, the browser grew (in functionality and thus size) because the OS didn't (in functionality), so why did it (in size)?

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#126

Post by dspillett »

bzzzt wrote: post #102
dspillett wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 'network transparency' which doesn't work that great and almost nobody uses.

Works fine enough, and I use it occasionally to this day (though it is replaced by other things for many tasks these days).

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#127

Post by FirmwareBurner »

moron4hire wrote: post #125
blowski wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ignor…

> \* realtime collaborative spreadsheet editing > \* live backing up all my files These are broadband adoption and bandwidth issues and don't explain why the OS has grown. We had real-time networked apps in 1998. We had networked file-sharing and backups. > \* 28 inch high definition monitor > \* watching movies in HD > \* playing almost lifelike games > \* Running large complex scripts on the same machine I can easi…

>Better sandboxing of the browser explains (though only partially) why the browser has grown, but didn't explain why the OS has

Because the same kind of sandboxing happens on OS level now as well. In Windows 9X days the apps could access the hardware directly but not anymore for safety and security. Everything is now layers upon layers of sandboxing that must talk to the HW via APIs.

>because the OS didn't (in functionality)

Didn't it though? Or are we being needlessly snarky?

I don't remember Win 98 having on-line automatic OS update and automatic driver update, firewall, heuristic anti-malware, DirectX 12 support(check the featurelist compared to DX 5), support for multi-core 64bit CPUs, PAEX, NVME SSDs, WiFi, multiple high-dpi screens, virtualization(Hyper-V), USB4 & Thunderbolt, accelerated fancy transparency in the GUI, etc.

Yes, some of those features are hardware related, but having the OS support all those new HW features and exposing it reliably and securely it to the userspace adds bloat in from of binary code that makes all that work seamlessly.

All of those features and support for all that newer faster hardware, are a given now but were unheard of in consumer OS back then when PCs had the complexity of a toaster by comparison.

So let's stick to the facts, not emotionally driven rose tinted glasses.

> so why did it (in size)?

Because as HW became powerful and cheaper, it made it less profitable for SW companies to hyper optimize everything like they were dong in the Win9X days with assembly and stuff. It would be a needless expense that brings no ROI.

Yeah Win11 is needlessly overbloated compared to WinXP, but people said the same about WinXP when it launched, compared to Win98, and they said the same about Win95 when it launched, compared to DOS. Where does the buck stop? At the Altair 8800? Pretty sure that had no bloat.

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#129

Post by monocasa »

signal11 wrote: post #25
gwervc wrote: post #20

Earlier 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.

I mean, I was rocking a 1920x1200 CRT for my Win2k/Win98SE dual boot system that I had until WinXP64. They were plenty capable of efficiently using the screen real estate.

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#130

Post by therein »

monocasa wrote: post #129
signal11 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, I was rocking a 1920x1200 CRT for my Win2k/Win98SE dual boot system that I had until WinXP64. They were plenty capable of efficiently using the screen real estate.

I remember seeing Win9x UI on a really high resolution CRT display for the first time in early 2000s. It just had so much visual appeal to it.
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