Post about windows93

Hey you, weird person that somehow reads my commit messages in their
entirety.  Here's a fun fact for you: I posted this while on a train.
This is probably be the first time I posted something to RSRSSS on a
train.  Have fun reading the rest of the git log!

feed.xml

@@ -2136,6 +2136,24 @@ return <type id="{$i}" name="{$type}" count="{$count}" />
         <p>So, if you find yourself trying to extract data from HTML, XML or JSON documents, do check out <a href="https://www.videlibri.de/xidel.html" target="_blank">Xidel</a>. It might not be as trendy as other tools like jq, but it is a lot more powerful.</p>
       ]]></description>
     </item>
+
+    <item>
+      <title>windows93</title>
+      <pubDate>Sun, 24 Dec 2023 11:34:37 +0100</pubDate>
+      <guid isPermaLink="false">windows93</guid>
+      <category domain="https://envs.net/~lucidiot/rsrsss/">Feed</category>
+      <link>http://www.windows93.net/rss/</link>
+      <description><![CDATA[
+        <p>Something like 15 years ago, back when I was still excited by tons of things with computing, and not tired of where the whole industry is going thanks to capitalism, I discovered a service called <em>Desktoptwo</em>, and more generally the concept of a WebOS.</p>
+        <p>Desktoptwo was emulating some mix of the Windows, Mac and Linux desktop experiences, in a web browser. You had a few simple apps available like a notepad, and some storage space to keep your files on their servers. You could also use OpenOffice Writer, Calc and Impress: those would open a remote desktop connection within the browser to the actual OpenOffice running on their servers. It was quite impressive for the time.</p>
+        <p>At a similar time, I had also played with the Microsoft Office 2007 "Test Drive", powered by Runaware. Using Internet Explorer only, you could for a short amount of time play around with Office 2007 on a Windows XP virtual machine, using Citrix. Runaware also had other demos running, including one for Sage. I remember spending a lot of time just messing with those virtual machines, without knowing anything about the technology that made this possible yet. I was like 10 years old!</p>
+        <p>A few years later, I had found eyeOS, yet another WebOS, but that you could self-host this time. It had more applications available, but they were less interesting—the whole thing was more meant to be a demo of what apps you could create with it. They had something akin to an app store. I tried both their own demo instance and hosted my own, as I had learnt a bit more about webservers by that time.</p>
+        <p>I now tend to be wary of large piles of JavaScript like those as the current state of the JavaScript ecosystem tends to make everything worse, so I don't generally care much about the current attempts at making a new WebOS, like <a href="https://www.os-js.org/" target="_blank">OS.js</a>… unless they are fun.</p>
+        <p>Windows 93 is a pretty well done recreation of the Windows 95 user interface that started in 2014. It has a community that provided plenty of new apps to give the system a lot of content and fill it with weird jokes and "viruses". This is definitely not meant to be a replacement for a desktop OS like Desktoptwo or eyeOS attempted, and just a weird bundle of apps and games that mix the modern web and 30-year-old designs.</p>
+        <p>Their RSS feed gives some rare status updates about the project. I thought the project had been pretty much dead by now, since the feed had gotten no updates at all in a long while, but they announced that they working on a full rewrite. Version 3 will be open source, and it will be based on <a href="https://github.com/windows93dotnet/sys42" target="_blank">Sys42</a>, their own custom framework that skips one of the worst parts of modern JavaScript (Webpack) and allows building any web OS, not just a whimsy Windows 95 clone.</p>
+        <p>I am impressed by how much effort people sometimes put into these projects.</p>
+      ]]></description>
+    </item>
   </channel>
   <access:restriction relationship="allow" />
 </rss>