Oooh, the goosebumps of running Microsoft Visual Basic 1.0 in Windows 3.1 as in 1994, while writing a React form by hand in 2022.

I think I'm going to use this as the WAF for my next site.

Donkey.bas… ah good times. I poked around a few programs I remembered and then came across King’s Quest, which includes a long article on the copy protection scheme they used for floppies. Really interesting reading! This site has more to offer than an emulator and archive. https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/game/other/1985/kings_qu...

The earliest GUIs are scary to look at compared to how they are today, but the later GUIs show that the development slowed down at the end of the last century.

I truly believe that modern GUIs suck to no end compared to the older ones in terms of usability, discoverability, and consistency. Windows 3.1 was way ahead of the modern UX-driven-junk-science detritus.

I weep for mouseover tooltips, for actual offline and searchable documentation with full index, for this little question mark button on the title bar.

And keyboard shortcuts!

The accelerator key annotations in dropdown menus were brilliant, as they unobtrusively trained you every time you used them.

I really like the Borland GUIs from the early 90s: Turbo Pascal 7, Borland C++. They nailed it back then.

Agreed. I recently started playing with my old copy of Turbo C++ in an emulated Windows 3.1 system in QEMU. It was slick. I also have the original box and manuals that came with it though those are at my parent's house at the moment.

Absolutely. UI progress peaked at the old PalmOS.

This is great to take a quick look at some old piece of software, but if you want to get more involved, I would suggest something less constrained and more performant than a web app. I can't speak for other platforms, but https://86box.net/ seems to be the standard for old PC emulation on desktop OSes.

I do not have experience with 86box. I've just used disks that I already had and loaded them into a QEMU disk image. Then I can do stuff like this:

qemu-system-i386 -hda win31.img -hdd progs.qcow2 -boot ca -cpu pentium -m 16 -vga vmware -soundhw sb16,adlib,pcspk

The OS then boots in a window with a C and a D drive. The D drive is where I put all the archived programs I want to play. The way I set it up initially formatting it with Windows 3.1 and MSDOS 6 and then attaching it to a different Windows 7 VM that allowed me to copy the backup files off my NAS onto the disk. Then back to Windows 3.1 for the fun.

Amazing. Needs soundblaster emulation though. I vaguely remember the sound from Dune II wasn't bad.

The boot gave me goosebumps. Thanks.

https://www.pcjs.org/machines/pcx86/ibm/5160/mda/