Windows 3.1 written in JS/HTML

seeing "Internet Browser" there made me imagine a fictitious scenario where some time wormhole opened up and 20 years ago there was one special computer that was in all ways identical to your average Windows 3.1 machine. the difference, though, like cyberdyne technology from Terminator, it had "Internet Browser" that nobody could explain but somehow had all the worlds knowledge from 2014 sitting right there behind a single icon.

yeah, it's friday.

stormbrew5• 13 years ago

Well, ya know, there were browsers for win3.1. They didn't time warp to the 2014 internet, but they did work with the 1994 internet thanks to trumpet winsock.

http://dl.maximumpc.com/galleries/webbrowsers/Cello.png

Those were the days.

djpowell• 13 years ago

You could get IE5 for win3.1, which isn't a million miles behind IE6 that a lot of people are still using / developing for.

guiambros2• 13 years ago

And using SLIP connections, with SLiRP on the server side, likely over a 1,200bps dial-up.

It was a patchwork of hacks, just to make Windows use IP over a serial line, so you could use Mosaic and Pegasus.

Still, it was a magical time.

dpcan2• 13 years ago

Or Trumpet + Mosaic, which came out in 1993

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)

But I get his point completely. When I think back to that time of using Win 3.1, I have fond memories of Encyclopedia's on CD-ROM, Solitaire, Paint and Minesweeper, but I don't really think about the early Internet experiences much - probably because there just wasn't much out there yet.

oso2k• 13 years ago

I concur. My first experiences on the internet were on a Mac with Netscape Navigator 1 & 2.0, and Netscape Navigator 2.0 and 3.0 GOLD on Windows 3.1. This was in 1995 as well.

Intermernet• 13 years ago

Ah Trumpet Winsock!

Berkeley sockets for Windows

Terrible Haiku...

greenyoda• 13 years ago

I actually remember running a browser, probably one of the earliest versions of Netscape, on Windows 3.1 around 1995-6. We had to use a 3rd-party TCP/IP stack since Windows 3.1 didn't have it built in. Those were the days when the web was still new and exciting.

Sami_Lehtinen2• 13 years ago

NCSA Mosaic and Trumpet Winsock worked well.

mixmastamyk3• 13 years ago

Might wanna load up on MSFT while you're there.

Apocryphon• 13 years ago

Wouldn't AAPL be an even better bet?

mambodog• 13 years ago

Alternatively you could just run the real thing :)

http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ibmpc-win/

Caveats: it's actually 3.0 and the mouse doesn't work... yet

codezero• 13 years ago

mouse? who cares, there's wolfenstein!

Mindless2112• 13 years ago

Where? All I can find are Solitaire and Reversi... which surprisingly enough can be played with the keyboard.

wiradikusuma• 13 years ago

I opened Command Prompt and did DEL . in C:\WINDOWS and C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM. The system is now corrupted from here.

muyuu• 13 years ago

That's really neat. Is it yours?

crazygringo• 13 years ago

Gotta say, it's the pixel-perfect Minesweeper that did it for me.

Cool little project. It's actually surprising to remember how intuitive Windows 3.1 was. Simple to use and got the job done.

Buge• 13 years ago

I lost on my first click a few times.

mixmastamyk3• 13 years ago

If only the latest desktops were that easy to use. :/

beggi3• 13 years ago

I think this is the appeal of Chromebooks - simplicity.

Geee• 13 years ago

The design is surprisingly modern too. A bit of palette adjusting and it would pass as Windows 9.

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

flat and whitespace

userbinator2• 13 years ago

Except Win 9 would probably require a machine with over 100x the CPU power than what 3.1 needed, and yet still not be any better for the basic tasks of email, writing documents, etc...

dpcan2• 13 years ago

I've believed this for years too! Yes, Win 3.1 was just so simple, made sense, everything worked the same. There were windows with blue bars you could drag. The - icon brought down window controls, you clicked icons, everything was under the File menu.

But JUST when everyone was figuring out the UI, everything changed.

And to this day, when I'm teaching "mom/dad/grandma" to do something in Windows, she STILL asks where the "File" menu is because that's "where everything usually is".

Imagine how much LOVE MS Office would get if it went back to something like the early days of File menus and small-icon tool bars that you could enable/disable, etc? Well, I think it would be a win.

rlu2• 13 years ago

> Imagine how much LOVE MS Office would get if it went back to something like the early days of File menus and small-icon tool bars that you could enable/disable, etc? Well, I think it would be a win.

All you're saying is people hate change. Conversely, imagine if Office has always had the ribbon and then they switched to the toolbar menu UI.

Do you honestly think people would like it better? The obvious answer is that, no, of course they wouldn't because the ribbon UI is actually a better UI as it improves discoverability of features (and Office has hundreds if not thousands of features).

I for one make better documents with the ribbon. I think even my dad at this point has learned to be as efficient with the ribbon as he was in the old world. Realistically speaking though it didn't actually take him 7 years.

The world isn't going to improve if we optimize for older generations of people who are used to a certain way of doing things and dislike change. And that statement goes beyond software.

rbanffy2• 13 years ago

95/NT4 were fairly consistent and predictable too. It was after XP that we got competing programs for doing things the system could do, if not better, at least consistently. It beats me why every wi-fi, printer and display driver has to use custom, non-standard, windows, color-schemes, buttons and icons... It's like someone built a whole new GUI inside the driver without any regard to the OS outside. It's no surprise they are 100MB+ downloads.

DroidBurgundy• 13 years ago

Ski Free anyone?????

alvare• 13 years ago

I only managed to achieve 2 levels of recursion (that is, opening the site inside explorer inside the site).

akurtzhs• 13 years ago

Got to about 5. The address bar stops working at 2, but you can get to the main site from the start page.

thwarted• 13 years ago

What, no WfW 3.11 support?

It's almost too perfect... Windows 3.1 only had window resizing via a thick stipple outline of the window border, and the included web browser reflows too quickly, although that's a function of the hardware performance. It would be interesting to run Win3.1 on a modern multi-GHz machine.

jrabone• 13 years ago

Thanks to VMWare and some DOS network card drivers for the emulated hardware, I do! (only for curiosity's sake - I have virtual machines of every OS I owned.)

hagope• 13 years ago

Wow Notepad is still the same today!

jxf• 13 years ago

He took out all the fun parts. Can't "format C:", "del command.com", etc. :(

Iv• 13 years ago

No QBasic either...

pjbrunet3• 13 years ago

or "edlin" ;-)

aaronbrethorst• 13 years ago

No Ski Free, no deal.

http://ski.ihoc.net

Actually, this is pretty cool. Far more so, imho, than the "Web OS" or "Web Desktop" craze a few years back.

leeoniya• 13 years ago

deal on!

http://basicallydan.github.io/skifree.js/

basicallydan• 13 years ago

If we work together, we can all recreate the authentic Windows 3.1 experience on the web.

midas007• 13 years ago

Faster and more stable Windows and Windows NT 3.1 on period hardware. Awesome.

nside• 13 years ago

There are too many colors!

trevvvor• 13 years ago

Minesweeper left + right together mouse button action isn't implemented. Also, this version of minesweeper lets you lose on the first click. There is also no high score. For these reasons alone, I am very upset by this entire demo.

alxp• 13 years ago

Yep, no one who used Windows 3.1 extensively would put up with losing at Minesweeper on the first click. MS was actually pretty nice about rearranging the map so that the first click would not be a losing move.

whoopdedo• 13 years ago

All it needs to do is move the flag you click on to the first free square starting at the upper-left. The cheat helped me see this in action, but I've forgotten how to activate it now. I'll have to look that up again to see if it's implemented in this version.

jrockway• 13 years ago

This supports HiDPI better than Windows 8.

ben1040• 13 years ago

I opened up Media Player looking for CANYON.MID and was disappointed.

ghayes• 13 years ago

I was pleasantly surprised by Youtube popping in.

mikeknoop• 13 years ago

Michaelv.org is the personal website of Michael Vincent who, if you click around, is a huge TI calculator hacker (I dabbled back in the day).

In fact, my very first web server was going to be hosted by him. I recall sending him like $30 in the mail to host it way back when I was young enough to not even have a bank account yet.

beggi3• 13 years ago

Cool! Just won my first Minesweeper game, awesome!

overgard• 13 years ago

I appreciate the sentiment, but this feels almost nothing like windows 3.1. It has the skin but that's about it.

notastartup• 13 years ago

My god...a flash of nostalgia.

okay so where is the github of this? I'd like to find some excuse to use this library.

ankit842• 13 years ago

Is the operating system is about just simulating UI, file explorer, console with CD, and/or a pixel perfect game?

The real deal will be remote desktop inside the web browser. I shall be able to connect my PC (remote login) from anywhere in the world and use it's GUI.

ckoepp• 13 years ago

Well, for a fun project a GUI is quite enough and I bet it took him more than just a single day to do it. The title of this submission surly is a bit too enthusiastic...

But don't complain - it's still a funny thing to look at, right? :)

ankit842• 13 years ago

agreed, he took more than a day!

HN front page has seen many such implementations on JS to simulate OS in browser. For last one year people are pushing the capabilities of Web-browsers by demonstrating such examples. But now this is the time I expect remote-desktops should come (without any plugin/java support).

frozenport• 13 years ago

VLC has a Java interface and teamviewer has a portable version, not to mention 'ssh -X'.

lafar6502• 13 years ago

beautiful

mikeflynn• 13 years ago

It was fun to beat Minesweeper 3.1-style! (Though, I missed the ability to double-click on the number to clear the surrounding non-flagged squares.)

ewoodrich• 13 years ago

Well done. Although, the embedded Youtube frame of Ron Paul on Stossel in Media Player felt like jumping forward twenty years. :)

systematical• 13 years ago

This dude went all out.

mukundmr• 13 years ago

Why I do keep getting an "Application Execution Error" whenever I click on any app?

eonil• 13 years ago

Wow, this is real!

pjbrunet3• 13 years ago

For perspective, Zuckerberg was 7 y/o when Windows 3.1 came out:

http://www.timeanddate.com/date/durationresult.html?m1=5&d1=...

thought_alarm• 13 years ago

This is just as baffling and upsetting as the original Windows 3.0 was in 1990. Well done.

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

dithered icons, beveled widgets ... hypernostalgia.

inanov• 13 years ago

amazingly stable

jaredsohn2• 13 years ago

One part of the early authentic Windows 3.1 experience for some people (that is missing here) is having a DOS-based menu show up when you boot up your computer and then clicking on the Windows item or typing 'win' from the DOS prompt if you want to run some Windows-based program.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 13 years ago

...what? I had win.com in autoexec.bat

jaredsohn2• 13 years ago

Some problems with booting directly into Windows (it was eventually included within my autoexec.bat, but not for awhile.)

* Some DOS-based menu programs were really nice. I grew up using X-Tree Gold which had a menu but was also really fast for doing file system operations.

* Some DOS programs wouldn't work well in Windows (programs using serial ports, games), even if you set up PIFs.

* While in Windows, you couldn't use your TSRs (so you'd have to run the programs in non-TSR mode and set up different hotkeys for them and get used to the changes.)

Aardwolf• 13 years ago

Super cool!

One bug: Minesweeper is supposed to activate all non flagged tiles next to the mouse if you click with left and right mouse button at the same time. (see http://www.minesweeper.info/archive/MinesweeperStrategy/mine...)

(The problem is that this is so handy that once this reflex is wired in it's impossible to play Minesweeper without that feature)

anonymfus• 13 years ago

I think that using flags consume more time that you can save with such trick.

tux• 13 years ago

This has less bugs then original ^_^

hashx• 13 years ago

[insert obligatory comment about Atwood's law here]

smilekzs• 13 years ago

The pun on DPRK was hilarious.

jokoon• 13 years ago

inception is not innovation

randunel• 13 years ago

Bandwidth Limit Exceeded The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.

sTevo-In-VA• 13 years ago

Bandwidth Limit Exceeded The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.

OK, Now I'm curious.

kemo• 13 years ago

I just went over your bandwith limit... first request worked, refresh, exceeded :(

networked• 13 years ago

A somewhat working mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20130328165947/http://www.michae... (shows the basic UI but doesn't let you start any applications).

This reminds me of the whole "web operating system" or "web desktop" trend [1]. It was pretty hot around the mid-noughties, or at least that's the impression I got, but peaked in 2007-2008 without having produced a killer app (tellingly, nowadays Google Docs and the like still don't offer you a "desktop"). I tried quite a lot of web operating systems at the time -- mostly to see just what they could do within the browser -- but, frankly, couldn't find much of a practical use for them except to mirror my static websites on the free webhosting with high disk quotas that many generously provided. At least one, YouOS (YC W06), got venture funding but even their product didn't work out (they pivoted -- successfully [2]).

Come to think of it, the way those systems got around the limitations of the browsers at the time made some aspects of them pretty strange. One I remember in particular integrated a real office suite with their Ajax apps thus: it had a Java VNC client with which you accessed OpenOffice.org running on their servers.

If you're interested in the history of the subject try exploring http://www.crunchbase.com/tag/web-os.

[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_operating_system and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webtop.

[2] http://www.youos.com/

shadowcats• 13 years ago

Something that would be cool: implementing X-Windows in JS, using HTML for rendering. So you could run your desktop applications remotely in the browser.

You'd have to tunnel the X protocol somehow to Ajax or Websockets, of course, but that should be quite easy.

Edit: I ran into this: http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2011/03/15/gtk-html-backend-upd...

hexscrews• 13 years ago

Gotta love exceeding your system resources in availability. Java + Cookie Enhanced Mode System Resources:314% Free

That's over 214% more system resources! :p

leoc• 13 years ago

The Web is just a buggy set of device drivers. ;)

TallboyOne• 13 years ago

can someone find a mirror or something? :(

jon_kuperman• 13 years ago

Someone should make a resource that allows you to see if your website is ready for the front page of HN :/

pbhjpbhj3• 13 years ago

How would you establish the bandwidth limitations of the site?

finishingmove• 13 years ago

This is great, but does it have the Blue Screen of Death? Wouldn't be much of a port without such an instrumental feature!

mratzloff2• 13 years ago

Fun fact: DOSBox runs Windows 3.1, and (on my MacBook Pro) it starts as fast as this website.

pbhjpbhj3• 13 years ago

But where did you buy a license to run 3.1 ...

mratzloff2• 13 years ago

ComputerLand in Wichita, KS. 1992. :-)

anilmujagic• 13 years ago

"Bandwidth Limit Exceeded" That happens when you hit HN front page :)

cturhan• 13 years ago

509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

Awww come on!

elwell• 13 years ago

"Bandwidth Limit Exceeded"

Not sure if actual error or faithful representation of Windows software.

Windows 3.1 written in JS/HTML

Related Stories