Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser (opens in new tab)

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.

The icons used in desktop are/were in progman.exe, shell32.dll and control.exe (IIRC, it was a long time ago).

https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...

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.

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...