Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Win95 is only 30 years old and runs natively on some modern hardware.

Apparently there is important stuff still running in emulated PDP-11s, almost double the age.





It needs quite a few fixes to even run in a VM. But it can be done: https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x

This post doesn't go to to great detail, but seems to run natively:

https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/1n1no1k/august_202...


It might be possible to use the rest of that RAM above the 4GB barrier as a ridiculously fast RAM disk, with an XMS driver like this one:

https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/HimemSX


Huh, so someone actually built this? I was thinking about something similar the other day, in the form of a Windows 9x driver that would use that inaccessible RAM as a "page file".

I did a similar thing on my DOS PC. Lots of DOS software gets confused when there is more than 64MB of XMS/EMS free. So I just gave 64MB of the 128MB to smartdrv. It's more RAM drive I ever had when using DOS for work back in the day.

Win95 complains about needing REAL mode compatibility for a RAM disk though. I wonder how much performance degradation is noticeable with a RAM disk though.


Yes certain software for Canadian made nuclear power plants, comes to mind. Was a post on the VCF forums about a job listing that required PDP-11 knowledge.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: