Windows 93: The joke OS that lets you relive retro 32-bit computing

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