Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser(pieter.com) |
Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser(pieter.com) |
So simple, so easy. Those were the days.
Instead folks go with Electron crap.
I wrote a blog about this many years ago: https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/simple-windows-dial...
We had clear colorful icons, text labels, scrollbars, clearly distinguishable checkboxes. And now we have UI that actively promotes "rebelliousness" and "being in the know".
Related: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251125-00/?p=11...
True story, and keep it in your hat if you know it:
I was expelled from highschool about 3 months in to my freshman year for doing this on the library computers to bypass the librarian needing to log us in, because the Mac lab printers weren't working and the report was due next period. Librarian was like "nah i'm on lunch" so i waited like 15 minutes, bypassed, printed, exited windows.
She was fuming, shaking showing printed papers with "autoexec.bat" showing an edit time[1] while she "was on lunch" and i "was the only one in there".
I actually got expelled from that school 3 times, twice for "hacking."
[1] hold shift to get to MS-DOS without restriction, edit AUTOEXEC.BAT to comment out the "security" "software" line, reboot. remove the commented line, reboot.
Discussion from Nov, 2024 with 160 points and 75 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42104531
I really would have liked to play Syndicate.
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.
The icons used in desktop are/were in progman.exe, shell32.dll and control.exe (IIRC, it was a long time ago).
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.
https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...
Nostalgia tends to make things seem better than they were. Moments like this remind me how much tech has improved over the years.
em-dosbox is a good project.
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 Cyrix and so on.
The planning spreadsheets were a series of Lotus 1-2-3 jobbies with a lot of manual copy and pasting and I gradually ported it to a Excel VBA job. To cut a long story short, I was running Win311 and Excel on a Pentium 75 with 16MB RAM, IDE HDD. Excel was way quicker to start than on a modern PC running Win 11 with an SSD.
Yes, a lot of things took a while but I ended up with a finite capacity plan in VBA for an entire factory that took less than five minutes per run. That was for meat and dough prep, make, bake and wrap and dispatch for 150 odd finished product lines. It generated a labour plan as well and ran totally to forecast (which it also did). Pasties, sossie rolls etc are generally made to forecast - they take a while to get through the plant and have to be delivered into depot with enough code (shelf life) for the customer (store) to be able to sell them and the consumer to not be given a dose of the trots. As reality kicked in, you input the actual orders etc and it refined the plan.
OK not the best tool for the job but I hope I show that a spreadsheet back in the day was more than capable of doing useful things. I've just fired up LO calc on my laptop with a SSD and it took longer than I remember old school Excel starting up or perhaps the same time.
Now what was slow was actual computations. Like try running a big spreadsheet in Excel or counting words in a big Word document on that hardware. It takes a very long time, while on modern hardware it's nearly instant.
The thing runs instantly. And that's in a VM in Javascript.
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!
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...
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...
>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?
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".
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.
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 seconds to load office programs for sure. It would take well over a minute to load a book from a 1.44MB floppy.
Anyway, software and computers have come a long way and I'm grateful for it.
Also, file formats were binary optimized at the time, compared to current XML behemoths compressed with zip. So 12MB file in 1993 is probably something like 100k+ rows, and try that out today.
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 years back. Now, literally, and not just IT.
And that's sad, because you have Turbo Pascal, Windows NT, the VB6 IDE against C/C++ libraries... good products on MS where data correctned was granted with low level libraries called from VB. For sure BLAS/Lapack would exist in the 90's as products for Visual C/C++.
Reusing MS Office for advanced tasks was the key of the shitty computing we were suffering on tons of places. Such as the idiots using Excel tables for Covid patients instead of having a proper SQL database. Even SQlite (IDK about the constraints, maybe it fits) could have been a better choice.
People said with Unix "Worse it's beter". He, nowadays even NDB 'databases' would grant you correctness on scientific data (it's plain text with tuples) that these rotten binary, propietary, office bound pseudo databases and spreadsheets. Or even AWK with CSV's/TSV's.
on a 486, Lotus 1-2-3 was essentially instant - even from floppy disks it would run faster than excel does today on a top of the line machine
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.