Transcription

Hello, everybody. My name is Eric, and today we're going to be trying out Windows 95 on the Internet in 2025. That's right, almost 30 years after this initially came out. Windows 95 was the first version of Windows that was really marketed as being Internet-ready and ready for this new paradigm that, at the time, had just basically started with America Online. So first of all, we've got this Internet shortcut here, this control panel. This is the one. Now, it's going to try and get connected, and remember that Windows this old doesn't really— it's not thinking of high-speed Internet, it's thinking of dial-up. So let's see. Well, no, we're not using a modem, so we'll go manual. Now we can—we want to use local area network, which was incredibly uncommon in the 1990s. Now we don't want to use email. You can use email, and it will still work, but you would have to use the absolutely ancient POP protocol. So we'll go through, we don't need a proxy server, and let's see. Let's see what happens. Let's first of all just see if this is—I don't think it has yet. So we can look at network, and we can see what we need to do. So here is our Ethernet adapter. We've got that, but what we don't have is something that is completely essential for using the Internet, and that is TCP IP. Actually doesn't come installed by default in this version of Windows. Now we can restart our computer, and we should have TCP IP. One other really annoying thing, because of—oh, these are just—oh, no, not again. Yes, if you click the wrong thing, because you—to use Windows 95 on a reasonably modern system, you've got to install the patch, even in a VM, because there's a bug with the CPU clock speed if it goes above a certain frequency, so we've just got to do that, because when I installed TCP IP, I overwrote that. Now we do have Internet, but we have to enable DNS, which isn't supported by DHCP on this version, so we can just do that, and that should make it work. And after a bunch of troubleshooting, mostly related to my Windows 95 install having some issues, it all works perfectly. Or, well, it doesn't quite work perfectly. Now what always amazes me is that Google have put a profound amount of effort in making sure that Google.com works on anything. I have tried this on every browser pretty much since the invention of the Internet, and it has always worked. Unfortunately for us, Google is the exception rather than the rule. Even Wikipedia, a site that's very dedicated to open knowledge, won't work on this browser. Now a big part of why is because of HTTPS. So let's see how we can make this experience more tolerable. Now I should point out that there are other sites that will work perfectly fine. A good example is a really cool project called the OldNet, which is designed to let you browse the Internet how it looked in the 1990s. Now because these are from the 1990s, a lot of this stuff will work. And we can go through the Nintendo 64. So that all works, and the TCP IP stack is incredibly backwards compatible, so you can absolutely use, whether it is a real Windows 95 computer or a virtual machine on the same network as a real computer with no trouble at all. And while there's nothing on the home page of my Linux systems NGINX server, we can see that it loads perfectly fine. So now let's try and get some more usable stuff going. Now here I've got RetroZilla, which is an attempt at making a tolerable modern browser on really old versions of Windows. I'm guessing the reason that crashed is because I copy and pasted, I got it from an ISO, and that's probably not going to work. Well, let's see if we can have better luck this time. So this is RetroZilla, and it does have a very clear warning that it is not secure. I believe this is by the same person who also makes Classilla for Mac OS 9, and it works reasonably well. It is intended to work all the way from Windows 2000 up to Windows XP, but of course there'd be no—on Windows XP, you've got Supermium, which is actually secure. Now thinking of Windows XP, you might be wondering, is this as dangerous? Suppose we'd actually expose this computer to the internet with its own IP address. The answer is surprisingly no. The reason is because Windows 95 actually doesn't have, by default, any insecure services. You can install SMB, but there is no worms going around the port scan for it, because 24-7 internet connectivity didn't exist when Windows 95 was mainstream, so you actually don't have to worry about that on Windows 95. Not to say that by any stretch of the imagination Windows 95 is a secure operating system—it is not. But it is going to be exceedingly hard to find any malware that's going to run on it. Now we can see if we can play a YouTube video on this. Uh, okay. Okay. I think the answer on that is a very definitive no. Now there are other browsers we can try. The last version of Opera to support Windows 9x is a popular one, although I don't know if that—I think that might need Windows 98. So at this point in the video, you may be thinking, there's no way we are ever going to get a usable browsing system out of Windows 95. And if the only system we could use for the end-to-end was Windows 95, you would be correct. But I do have a trick up my sleeve, and I'm going to show you, because I think it's actually really cool. So there is a project called Web1, and lucky for us, it's actually only AUL, so we can just install it directly to install .NET, and it is a .NET app that will make a web proxy where it will handle the hard stuff that can't be done on Windows 95, and then it will send images of it over to the Windows 95 system. So let's try this out. So what do we have to do to make this work in Windows 95? Well, we have to enable a proxy so that our Windows 95 system will reach my host. Go to Internet Settings, and we go Connect to a Proxy Server, and we go HTTP, and this is the right version, because this is intended for really old operating systems, and then we go 8080. With any luck, and it will also automatically go to archive.org if it can't load the current one. Now, let's see what happens if we go to YouTube on this system. Seems to give us a script error, but OK, we're getting a warning that our browser isn't supported anymore. Yeah, that makes sense. Now, let's try Wikipedia. Well, at least it loaded. What about CNN? Well, that's right. You can actually just skip blue screens on this version of Windows. That's actually really cool. OK, but it did kind of break. OK, now let's try more websites. So this is Apple, and as you can see, it doesn't look quite right, but it does work. The reason why this works is, well, one of the tricks that this proxy uses that makes this work, and we can also go back to RetroZilla, which hopefully won't crash on us anymore. I think I fixed the problem. Let's see about Reddit. Well, is it usable? I mean, that's kind of subjective. I think everything's here, so that's progress. So we got Reddit, which is actually, assuming this is internally loading the new layout, one of the more difficult websites. Let's try BBC. Let's try my own website. Yeah, that doesn't really work at all. I'm kind of curious what it sees as the source code for the page. OK, the source code is right, so it's just, this version of Internet Explorer is just too old. I think on Windows 98, this would all work pretty much perfectly, but Windows 95 is more of a novelty. Let's try VXUnderground, or it's .org, not .net, don't mind me. Oh, there's where you could donate, so that doesn't, that hasn't quite worked. I wonder if this is partially a resolution error, because we, I did install the graphics driver, so I can turn up the resolution, if that would make things better. Let's try 1600p. Now we've got a bigger view space. Hasn't really made anything better, but we can try more of that. And now we do actually get a semi-usable homepage for apple.com. So let's see, you know what, it's time to finally move on from Windows 95. I just saw the Get a Mac ad, and we've decided, let's see if we could, maybe, Oh, oh wow, these images are really wrong. It's, if we wanted the store, I think it's, I think that's right? Okay, let's just see if we can find any shopping, this should be the actual buy domain. Yeah, that's what we want. No, we're not really going to find anything of much use, but we at least get an overview. Or you could call this phone number, so at least you would be able to find the phone number, so you could actually buy something modern. Let's try Hacker News, that's, wow, it works! Crashed Internet Explorer, but it did work, so that was pretty impressive. The 7-Zip, 7-Zip website is pretty bare bones. Let's see if we can actually download something from it. That just may not be, oh no, it is possible. Okay, and of course that's not going to run, because we're a couple decades off. I don't know if there's a really old version on here that might. Oh, we can try it. I don't think any version of 7-Zip runs on Windows 95. Okay, I am being pleasantly surprised. Does it actually work? Yes. Okay, I did not know that any version of 7-Zip ran on Windows 95. Wow, so I think that's going to be the end of the video, mostly because the VM is really not liking this, but I am genuinely impressed that with the power of Web 1, you actually can browse some modern websites on Windows 95. Anything super interactive or that requires a ton of modern JavaScript isn't going to work, but if the site is simple and follows, it doesn't have to be compatible with Internet Explorer 3, but if it would follow HTML designs that were reasonable 20 years ago, it will in fact work. So that's going to be all for this video. Do I recommend it? No. Is it secure? No. But is it workable? Sure. So that's going to be all for this video. Please do leave a like if you enjoyed it. Tell me in the comments below what you thought. If you want me to try this with other really old operating systems like Mac OS 9 or ancient versions of Linux, let me know. That's all from me for now. Bye.