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Windows 1.01 in Your Browser

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21–30 of 33 posts

Re: Windows 1.01 in Your Browser

#21
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

overlapping windows was actually a challenging problem within the constraints of the old hardware.

Actually it was due to legal worries that Windows 1 only supported tiling. In Windows 2 they ignored the worries and Apple promptly sued.

There's a million links on that, this is one of the first with names and dates: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_N...

Re: Windows 1.01 in Your Browser

#22
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I find that site less interesting. It vaguely resembles Win9x, but only vaguely, it's not even trying to be faithful, and you can't really do anything. Compare that to michaelv.org (now defunct), which very faithfully reproduced Windows 3.1, complete with games, a filesystem, various small utilities, and such. Or to win95.ajf.me (which I made) which has an actual instance of Windows 95 in it, so you can fi…

It's meant to be cute, not useful. Besides, it has a (broken) gameboy emulator!

It does have a gameboy emulator! It's Grant Galitz's GameBoy-Online.

Re: Windows 1.01 in Your Browser

#23
post #3

Nice! If you missed it, there was also a similar demo but with Windows 95 just a few days ago, http://win95.ajf.me/

By the way, that runs best in Firefox, due to OdinMonkey providing ahead-of-time asm.js compilation. If you have issues with Chrome, try that.

(I should really add that to the site. Hmm.)

Re: Windows 1.01 in Your Browser

#25
post #18

The fact that they actually tried to compete with the Mac with this is amazing to me. And, as much as I dislike Microsoft products, you have to hand it to them; they persevered until they had a product that could compete. ...at least until OS X. (I couldn't resist)

This is why everyone still used DOS. Mac OS was bloated and slow as well. It was certainly the future but the 128k wasn't nearly enough. 512k made it better but it was still years away from living up to the hype.

Until OS X, laughable. iOS has done exponentially more for Apple than OS X has or ever will.

Re: Windows 1.01 in Your Browser

#26
post #4
post #2

The UI uses the "hamburger" element. I was surprised by that.

And flat UI elements. And you interact with a single program that takes up most of the screen. The more things change...

And when people ask me why I can't stand flat UI, I have to tell them that it reminds me of the UIs everybody outgrew in the 80s and early 90s because they were ugly as sin.

Flat UI just reminds me of Windows pre-95 and Mac OS pre-8, which I've never found aesthetically pleasing.

Re: Windows 1.01 in Your Browser

#27
post #18

The fact that they actually tried to compete with the Mac with this is amazing to me. And, as much as I dislike Microsoft products, you have to hand it to them; they persevered until they had a product that could compete. ...at least until OS X. (I couldn't resist)

This is why everyone still used DOS. Mac OS was bloated and slow as well. It was certainly the future but the 128k wasn't nearly enough. 512k made it better but it was still years away from living up to the hype. Until OS X, laughable. iOS has done exponentially more for Apple than OS X has or ever will.

My comment is about desktop OS comparisons.

Re: Windows 1.01 in Your Browser

#28
post #18

The fact that they actually tried to compete with the Mac with this is amazing to me. And, as much as I dislike Microsoft products, you have to hand it to them; they persevered until they had a product that could compete. ...at least until OS X. (I couldn't resist)

They were not competing. Microsoft has always put phenomenal effort into backwards compatibility. Windows was constrained to work with DOS, your DOS device drivers, and most importantly your DOS apps. The majority of initial PC buyers were businesses, and those apps mattered. The last time I tried, the MSDOS 1.0 version of Visicalc (1982) still ran under Windows.

By contrast the Mac didn't provide any Apple 2 backwards compatibility (although I believe one Mac model had an add on board, and there was the IIgs). Windows and the Mac were competing in different dimensions (backwards compatible, hardware & software variety versus green field new platform).

TopView - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_TopView - GEM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager - and to a lesser extent Desqview and similar were the competition for Windows, until later OS/2 was as well.

Re: Windows 1.01 in Your Browser

#30
post #2

The UI uses the "hamburger" element. I was surprised by that.

Although, back in the day, I think we would have called that icon a "grip" since it appears to have been styled after a grip floor. In fact, I still call that icon a grip because it looks more like a grip than a hamburger. I've never eaten a hamburger that has three floating equal layers.

https://www.google.com/search?q=grip+floor&source=lnms&tbm=i...

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