Pointing this out without a trigger warning is just rude ;-)
Some of us are older than we think, yo.
It inspired a weekend project. I always liked that you could swap the card backs in OG FreeCell and play with different "themed" decks, so I vibecoded something a little more modern. I got carried away and added a roguelite mode too (yeah I know how "Roguelite FreeCell" sounds). Anyway, it's free to play on the web, no ads: [https://freecellworlds.com/]
Basically a 1992 rogue-lite where each room is a different solitaire game. eg: front parlor == clock solitaire, first bedroom == regular solitaire, upstairs is blocked by freecell, etc...
Screenshots: https://www.mobygames.com/game/1986/solitaires-journey/scree...
It's a fairly rich concept, you have a ton of different gameplay bound together by a very loose plot/quest mechanisms (eg: blue key == blue door ; boss == win 2 games of solitaire).
Definitely worth sharing if you've got some solitaire fans in your life!
For me it was a bit sad to see the mad and creative UX world of the homecomputer era being bulldozed over with the minimalist uniform results of the scientific usability research.
Little did I know that a mere quarter century later we are back were we once started and everyone as clueless as we were in the 90s goes overboard everywhere as if there was no tomorrow.
Yeah, and it sadly makes me miss the nicely ordered and easily usable world - I'm gettin' old I guess.
https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/cdplayer/
I always liked the look of the more complicated ones like this:
https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/2021-09-29-media-rack-download-win...
Honestly, if NTVDM was part of Windows then it seems fair to use it, even 3rd party clones.
A lowest common denominator idea of "everywhere" is just not that useful.
If Microsoft ever makes something that actually meets all the needs that Win32 addresses, they'll probably build a compat layer and a) your win32 code will still work in compat mode, b) that new thing may be worth targeting.
Current NetBSD still has good support for running SunOS binaries, though, including graphical ones. I'm certain you could get a SunOS 4.x binary from pre-1992 to run on NetBSD/SPARC. I've no idea how far back you could potentially go on NetBSD/m68k -- probably quite a ways, especially if the binaries are statically linked. SunOS pre-1988 was all static linking!
(Running "real" 4.3BSD binaries might be hard -- I think NetBSD/VAX defaults to ULTRIX compat, which is an either/or thing versus strict Berkeley Unix compatibility. Same binary format, similar but incompatible syscalls/data structures.)
> I can't even run a binary from one Linux distro to the other
More broadly, there are things like manylinux and MUSL which allow cross-distro applications.
As long as the container bundles the right libc, the program should work.
At one tine, Slackware Linux would not recompile binaries unless the program was patched. So there was a time you could find rather old binaries on Slackware, and maybe still on other distros.
I wonder what the oldest unchanged source/program running on Linux or BSD ? My vote goes to cat(1) :)
Otoh, /usr/bin/true has only minor changes since initial import (1994) https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commits/main/usr.bin/...
/usr/bin/false is similar
We could even have unified desktop.mobile codebases, with different GUI layouts. 280 North's objective-J/Cappuccino proved this.
IDK what we're even doing anymore.
Still the best navigable phone I had when coupled with the Nova Launcher gestures.
This precisely coincides with the web developers being allowed to wrap stuff into "apps" in Electron and the like.
I think we've actually completely stagnate on the human interaction side of OSes and only emacs has made any progress and then only for those willing to put the work in, not as a vanilla user ui.
What does this mean? I use lots of apps that still have a menu bar.
Some apps eschew it, like browsers, but not because they are “mobile first”, but because they are trying to maximize screen space.
If that was the case they wouldn't put giant dead space margins around every UI element.
Well that can't be entirely true, the desktop experience on Windows 10 improved on Windows 8 by leaps and bounds.
In large part, windows 10's ui is more like that of windows 95 because it undid the changes away from the windows 95 paradigm that windows 8 did. Furthermore, those changes away from windows 95 in windows 8 were the exact kind of thing that might be called "mobile first".
I still run Windows Classic GUI here, because its fast and confortable to use. Can you do better? Hmm, maybe. But im not conviced :)
Super daft and somewhat insulting take. I started my computing journey with Windows 95, meaning I have plenty of experience and some emotional attachment to it and I'm as millenial with knee pain as they get not Gen-Z, and can't imagine using W95 today productively in a non-ironic way.
Windows 95 was perfect ... for what people did on computers in 1995, not for what I do now in 2026 on the HW of today. May W95 rest in peace, but I'll take my modern OS for my moderns entertainment and productivity tasks on modern HW. There's no way in hell I'd want to go back to W95. People calming otherwise have rose tinted glasses and only remember the good parts of that era without the downsides.
Win 95 had none of that. "Classic windows" makes sense if you also use it in a classic way, meaning one full screen app opened at a time, that's it, with the desktop being the center piece, not the browser.
How are you running the classic GUI?