From a2ed54a98efe2235326a725f0222a493598a9020 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: lucidiot Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2023 11:36:03 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] 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 | 18 ++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 18 insertions(+) diff --git a/feed.xml b/feed.xml index 8aafff6..e3b7a98 100644 --- a/feed.xml +++ b/feed.xml @@ -2136,6 +2136,24 @@ return <type id="{$i}" name="{$type}" count="{$count}" />

So, if you find yourself trying to extract data from HTML, XML or JSON documents, do check out Xidel. It might not be as trendy as other tools like jq, but it is a lot more powerful.

]]> + + + windows93 + Sun, 24 Dec 2023 11:34:37 +0100 + windows93 + Feed + http://www.windows93.net/rss/ + 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 Desktoptwo, and more generally the concept of a WebOS.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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 OS.js… unless they are fun.

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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.

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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 Sys42, 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.

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I am impressed by how much effort people sometimes put into these projects.

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