Very excited to see Superlogo there! As a Dutch kid I grew up with Windows 3.11 and have devoured all "Programmeren voor Kinderen" books that made me learn to love programming.
Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
61–70 of 84 posts
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That file name thing was from Win95 keeping DOS (FAT) compatibility by introducing FAT32/VFAT: long file names were truncated to standard 8.3 names from DOS (and by extension, Win3.11 too) with fs extensions used to store long file names alongside DOS names. Win95 would show long names, DOS would show shorter ones. Also, file formats were binary optimized at the time, compared to current XML behemoths compressed with…
Yes, and I seem to remember that 100k lines was well over the excel 5.0 limits at the time. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#63Oh, I didn't immediately noticed that this was made by Pieter Levels!
Discussion from Nov, 2024 with 160 points and 75 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42104531
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I mean if people are reverse engineering entire n64 games into its original code that can target the original SGI compilers, then it is possible to reverse this other code. I don't think there is a drive to do so though. Thats where I hope some future LLM could help lower that barrier to people already well experienced in reversing.
>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.
Can modern Office reliably open the old formats? If so they must have implemented the parsers correctly no?
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#65Very impressive. Does anybody know the technical details of how this demo was put together?
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#66I feel personally attacked. I still use that exact mousepad from 1994. It's a 32 year old mousepad.
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
That file name thing was from Win95 keeping DOS (FAT) compatibility by introducing FAT32/VFAT: long file names were truncated to standard 8.3 names from DOS (and by extension, Win3.11 too) with fs extensions used to store long file names alongside DOS names. Win95 would show long names, DOS would show shorter ones. Also, file formats were binary optimized at the time, compared to current XML behemoths compressed with…
Yes, and I seem to remember that 100k lines was well over the excel 5.0 limits at the time. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Yeah, search confirms it was limited to 16k rows.
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I mean if people are reverse engineering entire n64 games into its original code that can target the original SGI compilers, then it is possible to reverse this other code. I don't think there is a drive to do so though. Thats where I hope some future LLM could help lower that barrier to people already well experienced in reversing. >And that's also why conversion in either direction almost always carries loss potent…
> Can modern Office reliably open the old formats? If so they must have implemented the parsers correctly no?
It can. But at two costs: first, MS has to keep all that legacy garbage code around - and we all know that just blindly deserializing stuff from potentially hostile input raw into C structs is ripe for getting exploited, and there have been a lot of bugs in there. And the second cost is, you can't reliably save an old document into a new XML document, hence the warning you get "this document was created in an old version of Office, are you sure you want to save it".
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 twiddlin…
Sadly, Excel and the dumbness of the environment generated disasters on Genomics (and tons of other research areas too) causing millions if not billions of losses. Hint: skewed experiments/data and so on, making years of effort worthless. That woudn't happen under BioPython/BioPer/Rl and a custom dedicated interface with no data mangling at all. Poeple in the 90's joked about how MS turned the whole IT industry 20 ye…
You're forgetting that Excel is the most ergonomic programming language in the world, full stop, nothing else even comes close. Until it's as easy to build something with those other things as it is to whip up a sheet in Excel, they're not leaving the starting gate when it comes to usage, especially by people who are not professional software devs
Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
#70Started the Visual Basic dev env, added a button to the form, MsgBox "Hello World", and it worked. So simple, so easy. Those were the days.
Well, MessageBox() in the Win32 API is just a simple C function call: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/... I wrote a blog about this many years ago: https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/simple-windows-dial...
It’s everything leading up to the MessageBox() call that VB makes trivial.