Windows 95 Is Now an App You Can Download on Any Computer
Quartz
The entire operating system file is only 129 MB.
If you’d like to relive the heady days of 1995, when Seinfeld reigned supreme on the airwaves, and TLC warned us all about chasing waterfalls, you can now recreate a small part of the early personal-computer age.
As The Verge first noticed, Felix Rieseberg, a developer at Slack, decided to turn Microsoft’s world-changing operating system, Windows 95, into an app that anyone can download for their Mac, Windows, or Linux computer.
The entire operating system file is only 129 MB—a high-definition movie off iTunes is around 3 GB, for comparison—and you only need to download a single .zip file from GitHub to run it. It works surprisingly well, and many of the original apps are there and work well—you can waste your hours away doodling in Paint, play Solitaire until the cards fill the screen, and see if you remember how to play Minesweeper. The download also comes with a free trial of America Online Internet, which unsurprisingly, does not work, given that it’s 2018.
All that’s missing from this nostalgia trip is Windows 95’s truly blissful startup sound: