This is super cool! Ran into an issue though, the first time it boots perfectly, after the first refresh it loads for a bit (downloads the image again instead of from cache) and then a cachebuster URL is added and loading starts over, without ever finishing. Ideally it would just load from cache on refresh.
Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
21–30 of 84 posts
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#22The long pause after "Verifying DMI Pool Data..." as the disk image downloaded aroused a dormant feeling of dread in me as I panicked and wondered why Windows wasn't loading... back in the day it meant getting yelled at for "breaking" the computer and tasked with spending the day reinstalling Windows and everybody's programs.
Nostalgia tends to make things seem better than they were. Moments like this remind me how much tech has improved over the years.
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#23Look at how fast Excel loads. Compare to modern high-end PC with it's latest version.
Office really chugged on the PCs of the time though. We can debate whether modern Excel actually delivers enough more value than historical Excel to justify being as more resource-hungry, thus slower to load, as it is. But historical Excel appears fast on modern hardware, even in emulation, because the CPU, RAM, and permanent storage have had 30 years to evolve since it was released. Contemporary 386s and 486s would…
I beg to differ. I'm 55.
Let's go back to say around 1994/5. I've just got a job as the first dedicated IT bod for a pie factory near Plymouth (Devon not MA)! Win 3.11 was pretty much everywhere and was almost reliable - patching wasn't really a thing then in the MS world. By then Pentium (586) was a thing but the majority of machines were 80486, 80386s were still useful. There were also the 386/486 SX/DX and DX2 and Cyrix and so on.
The planning spreadsheets were a series of Lotus 1-2-3 jobbies with a lot of manual copy and pasting and I gradually ported it to a Excel VBA job. To cut a long story short, I was running Win311 and Excel on a Pentium 75 with 16MB RAM, IDE HDD. Excel was way quicker to start than on a modern PC running Win 11 with an SSD.
Yes, a lot of things took a while but I ended up with a finite capacity plan in VBA for an entire factory that took less than five minutes per run. That was for meat and dough prep, make, bake and wrap and dispatch for 150 odd finished product lines. It generated a labour plan as well and ran totally to forecast (which it also did). Pasties, sossie rolls etc are generally made to forecast - they take a while to get through the plant and have to be delivered into depot with enough code (shelf life) for the customer (store) to be able to sell them and the consumer to not be given a dose of the trots. As reality kicked in, you input the actual orders etc and it refined the plan.
OK not the best tool for the job but I hope I show that a spreadsheet back in the day was more than capable of doing useful things. I've just fired up LO calc on my laptop with a SSD and it took longer than I remember old school Excel starting up or perhaps the same time.
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Office really chugged on the PCs of the time though. We can debate whether modern Excel actually delivers enough more value than historical Excel to justify being as more resource-hungry, thus slower to load, as it is. But historical Excel appears fast on modern hardware, even in emulation, because the CPU, RAM, and permanent storage have had 30 years to evolve since it was released. Contemporary 386s and 486s would…
I beg to differ. I'm 55. Let's go back to say around 1994/5. I've just got a job as the first dedicated IT bod for a pie factory near Plymouth (Devon not MA)! Win 3.11 was pretty much everywhere and was almost reliable - patching wasn't really a thing then in the MS world. By then Pentium (586) was a thing but the majority of machines were 80486, 80386s were still useful. There were also the 386/486 SX/DX and DX2 and…
I did earn some bread with vba as well, and always advocate for efficiency, but I just opened a 12MB xlsx file in LO, and it took a couple of seconds on a 2024 thinkpad.
As far as I remember, my Win 3.11 machine (a 486 DX with 4MB RAM and 30MB HDD) wouldn't be able to store or open such a file, let alone recognize the extension. Also, it would call the file 2026022~.XL~ or something. And it took more than a couple of seconds to load office programs for sure. It would take well over a minute to load a book from a 1.44MB floppy.
Anyway, software and computers have come a long way and I'm grateful for it.
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#25Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#26"For the best experience, use Chrome." That's not Windows 3.11. That kind of thing is circa 2000, and a state none of us should want the Web to return to.
If this were a commercial project then I could understand the complaint.. but this is just a small, for-fun project and they have little motivation to put the extra effort into support for all browsers.
I'm not really complaining; just harking back to a shitty time that is, on some commercial sites, threatening to return. Especially as Apple finally allows Chrome on iOS, eroding the main bastion against it: Safari.
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Office really chugged on the PCs of the time though. We can debate whether modern Excel actually delivers enough more value than historical Excel to justify being as more resource-hungry, thus slower to load, as it is. But historical Excel appears fast on modern hardware, even in emulation, because the CPU, RAM, and permanent storage have had 30 years to evolve since it was released. Contemporary 386s and 486s would…
I beg to differ. I'm 55. Let's go back to say around 1994/5. I've just got a job as the first dedicated IT bod for a pie factory near Plymouth (Devon not MA)! Win 3.11 was pretty much everywhere and was almost reliable - patching wasn't really a thing then in the MS world. By then Pentium (586) was a thing but the majority of machines were 80486, 80386s were still useful. There were also the 386/486 SX/DX and DX2 and…
yep and that was Windows which introduced levels of latency and waiting times much worse than equivalent DOS software, but with easier to use and more intuitive menus instead of the usual DOS UI routine of either no menus or menus that showed with key combos, and power users knowing many key combination combos which weren't strictly necessary but both accelerated things and impressed newbs into thinking computers were too hard for them
on a 486, Lotus 1-2-3 was essentially instant - even from floppy disks it would run faster than excel does today on a top of the line machine
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#28Look at how fast Excel loads. Compare to modern high-end PC with it's latest version.
Office really chugged on the PCs of the time though. We can debate whether modern Excel actually delivers enough more value than historical Excel to justify being as more resource-hungry, thus slower to load, as it is. But historical Excel appears fast on modern hardware, even in emulation, because the CPU, RAM, and permanent storage have had 30 years to evolve since it was released. Contemporary 386s and 486s would…
This is just not true. The only chugging back then was reading from disks, and the entire Office suite was only a handful of 3.5" floppies. If you had already started Excel earlier, then it was likely still cached in RAM and would start nearly instantly. If not, then it was still only a few seconds.
Now what was slow was actual computations. Like try running a big spreadsheet in Excel or counting words in a big Word document on that hardware. It takes a very long time, while on modern hardware it's nearly instant.
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#29"For the best experience, use Chrome." That's not Windows 3.11. That kind of thing is circa 2000, and a state none of us should want the Web to return to.
it's too late, we're in chrome monoculture era for a while now
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
If this were a commercial project then I could understand the complaint.. but this is just a small, for-fun project and they have little motivation to put the extra effort into support for all browsers.
Bellard (yes, him) already had a working VM of Windows 2000 in the browser around a decade ago, with no specific "support for all browsers" (whatever that means): https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...
Sadly we can't all be Bellard