Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser • Hacker News Board

Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser

#71

Post by anthk » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 4:08 PM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #69

anthk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ergonomic? Who cares? By 'ergonomic' a notebook it's zillions better than Excel or even Org-mode from Emacs when you don't even have to deal with the limited input from the cells, or worse, localized functions in spreadsheets. Go try debugging some functions in Spanish or German being yourself a native English speaker.

The most ergonomic programming environment in the world today it's a mix between a notebook and a REPL with live changes. Something like a cross between Smalltalk and Jupyter, and that doesn't exist yet. Org-mode for Elisp it's close as it allows you to do literate programming, a REPL and such in a 'live' and documented way.

Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser

#72

Post by bastawhiz » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 4:40 PM UTC

anthk wrote: post #56

bastawhiz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly we can't all be Bellard

Also, look at 8086tiny, or PCulator/XTulator. These could be ported with ease to EMSCripten and run everywhere, not just in Chrome. Chrome almost became the new IE and Google, despite it's motto, the new Microsoft. Ok, the desktop? Android rules the smartphone sales in the world, and its online services are used by millions, with far more metadata grabbing than w9x/wxp on its day and with the same propietary OSes.

Consider: maybe it's not a matter of non-standard APIs, but bad performance. It's not simply porting to the lowest common denominator, it's making sure the code doesn't run at a snail's pace because the JIT/wasm compiler has a pathological edge case.

Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser

#73

Post by M95D » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 4:46 PM UTC

rzzzt wrote: post #17

smusamashah wrote: post #9

Can 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.

C:\Windows\System32\moricons.dll is still available, you can set them on shortcuts in Properties with the "Change icon" button.

Moricons.dll had icons for various DOS programs like word perfect.

The icons used in desktop are/were in progman.exe, shell32.dll and control.exe (IIRC, it was a long time ago).

Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser

#74

Post by M95D » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 7:10 PM UTC

alexjplant wrote: post #22

The 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 m…

I used a doublespace/drivespace volume for Windows. Backup was just booting from a floppy and making a copy of that file. Reinstall was "format c:", "sys a: c:", copy the volume file and dblspace.ini from backup.

Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser

#75

Post by sillywalk » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 7:12 PM UTC

M95D wrote: post #73

rzzzt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C:\Windows\System32\moricons.dll is still available, you can set them on shortcuts in Properties with the "Change icon" button.

Moricons.dll had icons for various DOS programs like word perfect. The icons used in desktop are/were in progman.exe, shell32.dll and control.exe (IIRC, it was a long time ago).

Raymond Chen has more on this:

What were the MS-DOS programs that Windows used the progman.exe stock icons for?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250506-00/?p=11...

What were the intended uses of those icons in moricons.dll?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250505-00/?p=11...

Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser

#76

Post by Gormo » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 8:18 PM UTC

cheema33 wrote: post #65

Very impressive. Does anybody know the technical details of how this demo was put together?

Looks like it's a really polished deployment of em-dosbox, i.e. DOSBox via Emscripten.

Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser

#77

Post by rzzzt » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 11:16 PM UTC

M95D wrote: post #73

rzzzt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C:\Windows\System32\moricons.dll is still available, you can set them on shortcuts in Properties with the "Change icon" button.

Moricons.dll had icons for various DOS programs like word perfect. The icons used in desktop are/were in progman.exe, shell32.dll and control.exe (IIRC, it was a long time ago).

shell32.dll is unfortunately modernized on modern versions of Windows, with very few exceptions :( the Novell tree is still there.

Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser

#78

Post by hypercube33 » Tue, Feb 24, 2026, 1:08 AM UTC

VerifiedReports wrote: post #3

"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.

You know 3.11 was end of support 2001 and some versions were still supported to 2008 so technically it's in era.

Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser

#79

Post by VerifiedReports » Tue, Feb 24, 2026, 1:19 AM UTC

gfody wrote: post #29

VerifiedReports wrote: post #3

"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

Not on mobile, though.

Re: Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser

#80

Post by GeertB » Tue, Feb 24, 2026, 1:30 AM UTC

Can't help myself: whenever I see Windows 3.11, I have to compute the difference between it and Windows 3.1. So, I fire up the calculator from the Accessories folder, and compute 3.11 - 3.1. The result: 0.00. Try it! :-)