When I hear "Computer Museum," I feel anger, and I realize that I'm not yet over Paul Allen's family dismantling his Living Computer Museum after his death. That place was doing really great work.
Virtual Computer Museum – VNC into Archaic Windows Systems
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Virtual Computer Museum – VNC into Archaic Windows Systems
#22I think Windows 2000 is the only one I remember fondly.
Just bought a T43 to run Windows 2000 this week. Just got wifi working with WPA2, so I just need some decent browser and some apps next.
Re: Virtual Computer Museum – VNC into Archaic Windows Systems
#23Interesting choice of tech stack – we're RDPing into a Win 8+ Windows session that, in turn, seems to be either using RDP or VNC to connect to virtual sessions.
I imagine that, if we were creating something like this today, we'd just emulate in the browser with a streaming disk!
Re: Virtual Computer Museum – VNC into Archaic Windows Systems
#24Interesting choice of tech stack – we're RDPing into a Win 8+ Windows session that, in turn, seems to be either using RDP or VNC to connect to virtual sessions. I imagine that, if we were creating something like this today, we'd just emulate in the browser with a streaming disk!
> I imagine that, if we were creating something like this today, we'd just emulate in the browser with a streaming disk!
Kind of like what https://infinitemac.org/ does for Apple systems?
Re: Virtual Computer Museum – VNC into Archaic Windows Systems
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's a grossly underrated OS. As good as Windows XP but without the awful garish themes - it had all that made the Windows 98 GIU great but with the stability of Windows NT. Also, I don't think you needed to activate it and it didn't have much in the way of telemetry. We'll never have a Windows version as great again.
XP had much better compatibility with Windows 95/98 software than 2000, especially games, as far as I remember.
Windows 2000 had a compatibility mode a la XP, but you needed to activate it with a command. No, XP wasn't better, some Direct Draw games just ran under Windows 95, 98, ME or 2000 in compat mode.
Re: Virtual Computer Museum – VNC into Archaic Windows Systems
#26Re: Virtual Computer Museum – VNC into Archaic Windows Systems
#27Seems to be down for me. Anyone else?
Re: Virtual Computer Museum – VNC into Archaic Windows Systems
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows 7 was also pretty decent, and managed to somewhat redeem the horror that was Vista.
Windows 7 was a beautiful operating system. It completely redeemed the absolute "horror that was Vista" for a lot of people.
I enjoyed using Windows 7 a lot. It was stable; much more so than previous versions and actually later versions - an update wasn't likely to break support for any devices or introduce a regression like it sometimes does on 10/11.
KDE 5 gives me a similar feeling to what I had with Windows 7. It's very customisable, and indeed with some theming you can make it look almost identical to Windows 7. But what is particularly nice is not so much the aesthetics, but rather the depth of functionality and polish that KDE has. There are hardly any rough edges, and features like KDE Connect are conceptually simple but mind-blowingly efficient in practice.
Re: Virtual Computer Museum – VNC into Archaic Windows Systems
#29It's great that someone is trying to preserve these operating systems. However the choice of limiting it to 1 user per OS at a time makes the museum/website unusable. I tried several times over the span of 20 minutes and couldn't get into a single VM.
While it doesn't cover everything, there is no shortage of browser-based emulators that can run most of the software listed.
Windows 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1 https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/
Windows 95: https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox
Windows 98 http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98
Windows 2000 https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...
Windows NT 4.0 https://pixelsuft.github.io/onwin/emulator.html?hda=winnt&cd...
Some of the more esoteric OSes, or the ones which actually need a little bit of horse power to run like Vista, you can easily download from archive.org and run locally.
Re: Virtual Computer Museum – VNC into Archaic Windows Systems
#30I think Windows 2000 is the only one I remember fondly.
I think it's a grossly underrated OS. As good as Windows XP but without the awful garish themes - it had all that made the Windows 98 GIU great but with the stability of Windows NT. Also, I don't think you needed to activate it and it didn't have much in the way of telemetry. We'll never have a Windows version as great again.
No telemetry, no activation, efficient non-garish UI, "NT stability" which was great for the time. Yeah, we'll never be able to get that back. I have Windows 11 on my gaming PC and it is... sheeesh.