Windows 93: The joke operating system that lets you relive retro 32-bi

[xper]

If you are nostalgic for the 1990s and old Windows PC operating systems like Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows 2000, now you can get your fill of retro 32-bit computing with Windows 93.

Windows 93 is an imaginary operating system dreamed up by two French multimedia digital artists, Jankenpopp and Zombectro. It lives in a web browser and you can play with it any time you like.

The artists announced on 6 March on Reddit that their project, which was first teased in October 2014, is now complete, and users can look forward to bright garish gradient desktop wallpaper, retro Windows start-up music and a plethora of funny applications that do mad things to the desktop.

Every application is a joke or game on its own and there are layers upon layers of things to discover.

You can watch Star Wars: A New Hope, completely rendered in ASCII text animation; deliberately cause incredibly awful glitches to the screen; run a defrag of the computer that takes forever but comes with catchy MIDI music; or even play a doctored version of popular DOS game Wolfenstein 3D.

There's a Matrix meme generator, a fake virus desktop icon, a late-1990s "Virtual girl" in the spirit of the first soft-porn digital companion widgets and a virtual PC where you can run a version of Windows 93 within Windows 93.

For a joke, it is a very elaborate one and has clearly taken the creators hundreds and hundreds of hours, and numerous JavaScript and jQuery plugins and libraries.

Computing has come a long way over the past 20 years but sometimes when we get annoyed with Windows 8 or the fact the Xbox Live network has been hacked again, we need reminding of how simple things used to be.

Homepage: Windows 93

Via IBTimes