There’s now an app to relive your Windows 95 nostalgia on a modern PC

By Chuong Nguyen Published August 24, 2018

Image credit: Felix Riseberg Image used with permission by copyright holder

If you’re feeling a little bit of nostalgia for Microsoft’s beloved Windows 95 operating system, there’s finally an app for that. What’s old is now a novelty again, and Slack developer Felix Rieseberg created an app that allows Windows 95 to run inside on more modern operating systems, including Apple’s MacOS, Microsoft’s Windows 10, and Linux.

This current development is based on a web project that supports Windows 95 and a number of operating systems inside a web browser, but Rieseberg goes a step further by packaging Windows 95 neatly into an app that’s approximately 129MB in size.

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Over the years, Windows 95 has been ported to various platforms. Most recently, it has been shown running on an Xbox One, an Android Wear smartwatch, and the Apple Watch. In the past, various developers got the OS working on a number of different smartphone platforms, including Google’s Android operating system, Apple’s iPhone running iOS, and Nintendo’s 3DS XL.

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“I put Windows 95 into an Electron app that now runs on MacOS, Windows, and Linux,” Rieseberg announced in a good-humored tweet. “It’s a terrible idea that works shockingly well. I’m so sorry.”

Because the app began as a joke for a few of his friends, Riesenberg didn’t enable some features, like support for mountable drives. However, after user requests, Version 1.1.0 of the app now comes with support for floppy disks!

With Windows 95 on your modern computer, you’ll be able to take advantage of some popular titles from back in the day, like WordPad, MS Paint, and even Minesweeper. The developer noted that you can even run Doom as well. When you’re running Windows 95, the app only consumes 200MB of disk space, so it runs pretty lean.

At this time, however, Internet Explorer doesn’t work within Rieseberg’s Windows 95 app. “Sadly, Internet Explorer isn’t fully functional as it simply refuses to load pages,” The Verge reported.

The source code for Rieseberg’s Windows 95 project — with floppy disk support — has been published on Github, so you can grab the files there if you want to give Microsoft’s legacy OS a spin some 23 years after the operating system debuted. If you do give this a shot, let us know what features of Windows 95 you miss or remember most.

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