Are you feeling nostalgic for the days of Windows 95/98/Me? (If so, you may be experiencing long-term memory loss, have an unusually high tolerance for pain and frustration, selective amnesia of traumatic experiences, or have never tried to actually get any work done on those systems. Consult a witch-doctor or faith healer if symptoms persist.)
Well, now you can relive at least some of that experience right in your browser, thanks to a JavaScript emulator for these systems called EmuOS. (Link is to the project’s GitHub page, including complete source code.) You can fire up the emulator in your browser with the link:
where you choose the theme you prefer and are presented with a desktop screen with links to dozens of games and utilities to try out. As this gHacks Tech News article:
explains, there is a bit less going here than appears at first glance. While this is a genuine emulation of the vintage Windows environment and includes many classic games, general-purpose features such as the Start menu, Settings, and the ability to add your own programs are absent.
And, actually, Windows 95 was a substantial improvement over Windows 3.1 in terms of stability. It has a 32-bit kernel whose memory management reduced the likelihood a misbehaving program would wipe the system and its ability to kill hung programs with the task manager avoided many reboots required in Windows 3.1 when a program stopped responding. However, the perceived stability of Windows 95 may have been less because with the faster machines and larger screens that became available around the time of its introduction, users were more likely to be running multiple applications at the same time, which not only increased the system’s vulnerability to crashes due to faulty applications, but also ramped up the pain of a crash by meaning you lost more work each time.
Windows 98 and (especially) Me had a reputation for being less reliable than Windows 95. This may have been because they crammed in new and flaky stuff like Ethernet drivers, Internet support, multimedia features, Internet Exploder, and USB drivers rather than anything in the core of the system.
They were all hideously flaky compared to Windows NT/2000, which was aimed at “Enterprise” users.
