What if you are giving a chance to live your life again? Or should I say, what if you are giving a chance to see what Windows computers look like 25 years ago?
Let me walk you back to somewhere within 1992 and 1995 and unveil the hilarious Window that never was, Windows 93
Windows93 might not have existed as a Microsoft Windows series. But if Microsoft released an operating system in the chasm between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 it might look something like Windows 93, an interactive art project by Jankenpopp and Zombectro that you can try right in your web browser.
The experience of the OS is hard to put into words—it’s Windows imagined in some parallel universe, with plenty of retro homages to the weird OS quirks of yore.
The hard drive defragger comes with a funky MIDI beat so head-bobbingly enticing that you’ll wonder why it wasn’t implemented in the first place. Perhaps familiar to some, a horribly sad “Virtual Girl” can sit on your desktop, though instead of flirting or stripping via 16-bit animation, this one lays there as lifeless as a paper doll. You can watch a video of Star Wars right on your desktop (the catch: it’s rendered in ASCII). And then there’s the “Totally not a virus. Trust me..im a dolphin” icon that’s pretty much a must-click, harkening back to the good old days when viruses were as much about pranking you as they were stealing your data. Though, for the record, that virus is nowhere as devastating as the army of Clippys that will randomly show up.
It’s surprising just how deep you can dig in Windows 93, thanks to content like GameBoy emulators and pixel editors that have actually been pulled from various sources across the web. I spent a shameful amount of time giggling nostalgically, until suddenly, a beach ball of death showed up on my screen. At first, I figured it was just another one of Windows 93’s jokes until, moments later, Chrome froze and then crashed.
Oh how far we’ve come in the last 20 years!
You can experience the thrill of Windows93 for yourself. Try it here.
As seen on Fastcodesign
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