Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/08/24/windows-95-turned-into-a-nativ.html
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3 Likes
I here electrons are the future. 
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Nostalgia lovers? Hell our production area at work STILL has computers running WIN95 and WIN3.11
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The question is: why would anyone want to?
Also:
Euh… yes it is 
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That’s a bit scary. Obviously they must shop on the vintage computing category of ebay a lot in order to have spare parts and systems to bring online whenever one of those antiques gives up the ghost. Why can’t they just use VMs or emulation to run whatever prehistoric mission-critical software those systems are running?
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Best Reason: Worms: Armageddon with hacks – later OS’s prevented an external app from modifying the running state of W:A. My kids were crushed when I upgraded.
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Hm. I skipped '95 back then.
I don’t think my machine will be powerful enough to run this.
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Is that a qa thing or it like that time I worked in institutional video and everyone seemed to think that sort of computer was perfectly suited to working in 4k?
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Reckon this isn’t going to have DirectX support or anything fancy.
A more intriguing development of late is BoxedWine, which finally realizes the dream of running Wine in Windows – meaning no copyrighted software needs to get involved. (The magic happens courtesy of a replacement for Wine’s X11 driver.)
There’s also Win3mu, for running Win3.x apps under Win32, but it looks like the developer has grown weary of trying to finish it up and is going to release the source. Reckon that might at least pave the way for Win3.x apps to be released on GOG or Steam – not that there’s much people might want to run. (Oh look, Indiana Jones and his Desktop Adventures is coming to ScummVM.)
And there’s PCem, which does a decent job of running Win9x with proper emulation of 3D hardware, something that’s normally not feasible with virtualization.
ETA: Someone on Imgur points out that by some coincidence, Windows 95 is 23 years old today.
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Sadly, Internet Explorer isn’t fully functional
Not that different to usual then
Vaguely related:
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Spot on. Every component failure requires installing parts procured from Ebay. One of the computers boots up to a welcome screen that says “Sara Lee”. Cost to port the necessary programs to WIN7 would be about $20k, but the contract has no budget to do so.
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Just a money thing. Computers belong to an old contract and there is no budget to update. Cost to update is trivial when compared to what would happen if the machines failed outright, but that decision is above my pay grade 
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Stumbled upon this recently, includes examples of production machines running OS2/warp 
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Where I used to work, we had a computer still running Win 3.1. It was built into an envelope-stuffing machine so the hardware couldn’t easily be swapped out for a VM, and the control software couldn’t be run on a modern OS because it was 16-bit. Replacing the envelope-stuffing machine with a new model that fit the layout of the room, did everything we needed it to do, and allowed us to continue to use the additional software we’d written to prep things for the stuffer was not a short process.
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Ah, OS/2. I still have the Warp install discs here somewhere. An under-rated system, used for far longer than anyone ever thought possible. Up to a very few years ago I believe it was still behind some UK banks’ ATMs.
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electron
No thanks.
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In a production context it wouldn’t be entirely surprising to learn that, not only are the OSes antique, they are there because the mission critical proprietary ISA interface card(or, if the gods really enjoy obscure cruelty, Micro channel card) needs them.
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A number of years back I temped at some travel agency that was quite possibly running DOS. I did some data entry but my main job was to babysit the giant dot matrix printer which printed out tickets. Hey! How else are ya gonna get those carbon copies to work???
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daisy wheel or ball printers?
triple layer continuous feed paper w/ perforated side tracts with the holes to feed the weight straight from the box. 2min of whining as the printer screeches out the transaction details in triplicate. pulling the feed sides off to free the white customer copy from the pink and yellow layers. those were glorious days…
