Windows 93 released at last!

Remember the days of defragging hard disks, endless sessions of Solitaire and a Blue Screen of Death every 13 minutes? A brilliant new “Windows 93” emulator relives the not-so-glorious days of computing. The spoof project is a browser-based version of an operating system that bears more than a passing resemblance to Windows 95.

It includes many of the features – good and mainly bad – that anyone who lived through that largely painful era of computing may have consigned to their Recycle Bin. There is, for example, a primitive web browser (Cat Explorer) that has bookmarks folders stuffed with the kind of chintzy, homebrew websites that used to clutter up the Yahoo search rankings in the mid-1990s.

There’s Piskel, a return to the days of pixel-by-pixel drawing, that would allow you to create the kind of artwork often found adorning the walls of mid-1990s computer classrooms (once you had raggedly torn off the perforated hole-punched edges of the paper used to feed the dot-matrix printer, of course).

Things are SOOOO much better now – find out what’s coming in Windows 10

There’s a selection of games, including a smashing pastiche of Castle Wolfenstein and our personal favourite, the ASCII-based Robby, a crackingly well-written game where you play a bungling bank robber. A fully working version of Solitaire is a given.

Being the mid-90s, there is naturally a selection of one-click-to-run viruses that will bring your Windows 93 system to its knees. You could try running the Dr Marburg anti-virus software to get shot of them, but we suspect you won’t get very far.

There’s plenty to explore in this well-devised spoof, which Microsoft’s lawyers are probably attempting to tear down as we type. There are also a few things in there that might be considered a smidgen NSFW, so tread with caution if you’re “booting” this up at work. It will crash any minute now, anyway, so the chances of the boss walking past and catching a glimpse are minimal…

Written by

Barry Collins

Barry Collins has been a technology writer, editor and broadcaster for more than 25 years. He was assistant editor of The Sunday Times’ technology section, editor of PC Pro and has written for more than a dozen different publications and websites over the years. He’s made regular TV and radio appearances as a technology pundit, including on BBC Newsnight, ITV News and Sky News. Now a senior contributor at Forbes.com, he also presents and produces tech-related podcasts.  

More about