Office really chugged on the PCs of the time though. We can debate whether modern Excel actually delivers enough more value than historical Excel to justify being as more resource-hungry, thus slower to load, as it is. But historical Excel appears fast on modern hardware, even in emulation, because the CPU, RAM, and permanent storage have had 30 years to evolve since it was released. Contemporary 386s and 486s would not have been that snappy.
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.
This is super cool! Ran into an issue though, the first time it boots perfectly, after the first refresh it loads for a bit (downloads the image again instead of from cache) and then a cachebuster URL is added and loading starts over, without ever finishing. Ideally it would just load from cache on refresh.
If this were a commercial project then I could understand the complaint.. but this is just a small, for-fun project and they have little motivation to put the extra effort into support for all browsers.
Bellard (yes, him) already had a working VM of Windows 2000 in the browser around a decade ago, with no specific "support for all browsers" (whatever that means):
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.
Ah. Every time I look at the UI, I realize just how much the modern UI/UX degraded.
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".
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 much tech has improved over the years.
Look at how fast Excel loads. Compare to modern high-end PC with it's latest version.
I came to write exactly this comment.
The thing runs instantly. And that's in a VM in Javascript.
Office really chugged on the PCs of the time though. We can debate whether modern Excel actually delivers enough more value than historical Excel to justify being as more resource-hungry, thus slower to load, as it is. But historical Excel appears fast on modern hardware, even in emulation, because the CPU, RAM, and permanent storage have had 30 years to evolve since it was released. Contemporary 386s and 486s would not have been that snappy.
I beg to differ. I'm 55.
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.
This is super cool! Ran into an issue though, the first time it boots perfectly, after the first refresh it loads for a bit (downloads the image again instead of from cache) and then a cachebuster URL is added and loading starts over, without ever finishing. Ideally it would just load from cache on refresh.
"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.
If this were a commercial project then I could understand the complaint.. but this is just a small, for-fun project and they have little motivation to put the extra effort into support for all browsers.
Bellard (yes, him) already had a working VM of Windows 2000 in the browser around a decade ago, with no specific "support for all browsers" (whatever that means):
https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...
Exited to dos, found Bubble Bobble in GAMES directory and started to play. And that's mostly what I used to do as a kid at the times of Windows 3.11!
My only complaint is the esc button you need in some of the games, make the fullscreen go to the small display again
what is this feeling? oh, yes, it's damn nostalgia
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.
Ah. Every time I look at the UI, I realize just how much the modern UI/UX degraded.
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".
I was expecting it to boot to DOS and then having to typing "win"
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 much tech has improved over the years.
Plenty of people would have used this purely for Cardfile.
em-dosbox is a good project.
Just a black screen for me.
Some previous discussion:
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42104531
I loved messing around with this for a short time. Very nostalgic.
I've been playing freecell on it for the last hour or so
Freecell is actually a 32-bit Windows application running through a Wine-like compatibility layer called Win32s on 16-bit Windows.