I was expecting it to boot to DOS and then having to typing "win"
And then crash.
Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
31–40 of 84 posts
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#32I was expecting it to boot to DOS and then having to typing "win"
autoexec.bat does that for you!
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#33I forgot how good the old version of excel was
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#34Earlier 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…
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…
This does not match my memory of using Windows 3.1. Excel would likely not have been cached in RAM from a previous run because a typical Windows 3.1 machine only had 4 megabytes of RAM.
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#35Look at how fast Excel loads. Compare to modern high-end PC with it's latest version.
They haven't released the old Excels as open source right?
Wonder if its feasible to reverse the old version using LLMs, vibecode it to run on modern platforms and then shorehorn in support for modern XLS format. At the rate LLMs are improving I hope someone will eventually partake in this challenge!
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#36Earlier 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…
The world runs on Excel. It is the largest development environment by far and no fancy language/framework can come close to touch it. The reason is because it acts as the glue to get real life things done in everything from large governments, militaries, large corporations all the way down to the small bed and breakfast operation across the entire world. Normal people have gotten real processes built by just twiddling around in Excel.
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#37IPv6 seems broken on this website.
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#38Look at how fast Excel loads. Compare to modern high-end PC with it's latest version.
They haven't released the old Excels as open source right? Wonder if its feasible to reverse the old version using LLMs, vibecode it to run on modern platforms and then shorehorn in support for modern XLS format. At the rate LLMs are improving I hope someone will eventually partake in this challenge!
> Wonder if its feasible to reverse the old version using LLMs, vibecode it to run on modern platforms and then shorehorn in support for modern XLS format.
Oh no it won't. Photoshop PSD and the legacy Office file formats have one thing in common... they are raw dumps of the C in-memory structs representing the contents. That's how they save and load so fast [1], in contrast to the modern formats which are a bunch of XMLs in a ZIP in a trenchcoat. Unfortunately, that makes reverse engineering them not just a challenge in itself, but also reimplementing because you have to reimplement Microsoft's original engines piece by piece, quirk by quirk.
And that's before wading into the mess that is OLE or, yes, the older people will shudder, ActiveX. Or the wonders that VBA macros could achieve, including just running stuff directly from kernel32.dll. I'm reasonably sure you could import the DirectX DLLs into an Office VBA macro and implement a full blown 3D shooter engine with DirectX instead of Excel.
And that's also why conversion in either direction almost always carries loss potential, simply put, not each quirk of the legacy format has been carried over to the "new" XML storage format, and certainly not into OpenOffice XML.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#39Can we have icons like these again please. I started from Windows 98 and always loved the icons. They actually represented the application and purpose. These days they are more focused on looking modern. Lots of times they are not even distinguishable between each other.
Indeed! The UI in general is more intuitive compared with mod flat bs.
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#40Look 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 isn't true at all, based on my experiences. Contemporary 386s were kind of slow, I guess, but these programs did not chug on a 486. I spent tons and tons of time in Excel and Access and writing VB/VBScript/macros.