Most of us remember the glory days of Windows 98. Now you can relive them on a less-shitty computer, thanks to several thousand lines of brilliant Javascript.
Copy.sh is an emulator that runs inside your browser and effectively is the Windows 98 OS, unlike some other webapps that merely look and feel like old-school windows. The project took four years to write, and more importantly, it comes with Minesweeper!
There are options to boot from a CD or floppy disc image, which presumably means someone with a little tech savvy could play Tribes or Half Life 1 in a browser! Hell, a good number of games from that era are abandonware at this point. That said, I did try to get Rollercoaster Tycoon running without any success.
The browser works too, sort of. When I tried to see what Gizmodo looked like on Internet Explorer, copy.sh went dead for a good two minutes before showing me this message:
Maybe that’s the Inception-level grossness of using a browser inside a browser causing the emulator to break, but it was also a nostalgic microcosm of just how much easier the act of using a computer has gotten in the past 20 years.