this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
75 points (90.3% liked)

Technology

71754 readers
3493 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

That’s not a typo. Windows 96 promised to build on the success of Windows 95, yet it never materialized as originally intended.

I only learned about this a few months ago. To me, this was an incredibly fascinating discovery and wanted to write about & share it.

"The Windows That Never Was"

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] LWD@lemm.ee 22 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This is a very good article, but this part peeved me on a petty level (as well as explaining why there's precious little in the way of screenshots):

While I can't find any uploads that are set to run on their website in a virtual computing session, the files are available to download if you felt like spinning up a piece of computing history.

The opportunity to do a little investigative journalism is right there, and the blog author didn't take it

[–] macstainless@discuss.tchncs.de 31 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Hi, author here 👋. Thanks for the feedback. If the Internet Archive had it on their own VM to run, I would've tried playing with it and taken some screenshots. However, I simply did not have the time to get it running locally on my machine, especially because I'm all Mac and Virtual Box doesn't run on M-series hardware.

I agree it's a missed opportunity, but I chose to go a little bit of an easier route.

Thanks for reading and enjoying the other 99% of the article. 😉

[–] hietsu@sopuli.xyz 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

UTM is the way to go on modern Macs, and even iOS/iPadOS too! Free, built on QEMU and super easy to spin up virtual machines with any architecture.

https://mac.getutm.app/

[–] LWD@lemm.ee 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Based on your descriptions of the integration between Windows 96 and Office, I did get the feeling you might run into even more issues if more software wasn't installed alongside Windows as well.

I'm all Mac and Virtual Box doesn't run on M-series hardware.

I had no idea!

And hopefully my comment didn't come across as a dig against your article - it just promises to be a potentially fascinating follow-up. Especially when, even today, Windows Explorer feels like it added previews of files as little more than an afterthought (and occasionally as a PowerToy).

BTW I enjoyed 100% of your article, I think it's a good sign when it leaves the reader wanting more!

Thank you! It didn't come off as a dig at all. Trust me, I thought about it and spent about an hour on Internet Archive looking for a version that ran on its site. But nothing was there and I learned the hard way last year that Virtual Box is still in the Intel era, so it's useless for me.

I did look into UTM as others are saying, but based on its description it may not be able to run an OS that far back. Something to look into down the line.

Either way, again, thanks for reading my work. I really do appreciate it. There's some other old Microsoft goodies I've written in the past, like this commercial introducing Excel.

[–] Decipher0771@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago

UTM is your friend in lieu of Virtualbox