---
title: "I Made A Thing, Powered by Windows Me™"
date: 2020-06-06 10:05:23-0400
description: "Introducing the Y2K Sandbox: fully featured, fully isolated, on-demand Windows Millennium Edition® virtual machines."
tags:
  - Projects
  - Nostalgia
  - Windows
  - Virtual Machines
image: "/static/images/notes/y2k-sandbox/screenshot.png"
---

import Image from "./components/media/Image";

A few months ago, I stumbled upon [my first website ever](https://jakejarvis.github.io/my-first-website/) on an old floppy disk. Despite the instant cringing, I [uploaded it](https://github.com/jakejarvis/my-first-website) to GitHub, [collected other iterations](/previously/), and made an [#awesome-list](https://github.com/jakejarvis/awesome-first-code) of others who were brave and/or shameless enough to do the same. But why not take that ~~one~~ 1,000 steps further?

Introducing the [**Y2K Sandbox**](https://y2k.app/) — with fully-featured, fully-isolated, on-demand [**Windows Millennium Edition®**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaNDeyYP98A) virtual machines, simply to experience my first website in its natural Internet Explorer 5 habitat. And maybe play some [3D Pinball: Space Cadet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt!_Pinball#3D_Pinball_for_Windows_%E2%80%93_Space_Cadet). Oh, and [Microsoft Bob](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob) is there too if you want to say hello and catch up. 🤓

<figure>
  <a className="no-underline" href="https://y2k.app/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">
    <Image
      src="/static/images/notes/y2k-sandbox/screenshot.png"
      width="865"
      height="649"
      alt="Play in the Y2K Sandbox, at your own risk."
      priority
    />
  </a>
  <figcaption>
    <a href="https://y2k.app/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">
      <strong>Play in the Y2K Sandbox, at your own risk.</strong>
    </a>
  </figcaption>
</figure>

The backend is powered by [**QEMU**](https://www.qemu.org/) (as a Pentium III emulator) inside isolated **Docker** containers, [**websocketd**](https://github.com/joewalnes/websocketd) (an **_awesome_** lightweight WebSockets server written in Go), and [**Cloudflare Tunnels**](https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/) (for some protection), all tied together with some [Ruby code](https://github.com/jakejarvis/y2k/blob/main/container/bin/boot.rb) and [shell scripts](https://github.com/jakejarvis/y2k/tree/main/host). ~~I'll push the backend scripts up to GitHub once I have a chance to untangle the spaghetti code. 🍝~~

The frontend is _much_ simpler with [a few lines of JavaScript](https://github.com/jakejarvis/y2k/blob/main/frontend/app.js) and [**noVNC**](https://github.com/novnc/noVNC), a VNC-via-WebSockets library, hosted by [**Cloudflare Pages**](https://pages.cloudflare.com/).

### 🎉 Update: [Everything is now on GitHub!](https://github.com/jakejarvis/y2k)

I must give credit to both [charlie.bz](https://charlie.bz/) and [benjojo.co.uk](https://benjojo.co.uk/), similar websites I was enamored with when they were posted on Hacker News a few years ago. Think we'll see some websites like these with Windows 29 in a decade?

<figure>
  <Image
    src="/static/images/notes/y2k-sandbox/windows-me.png"
    width="320"
    height="92"
    alt="@microsoft Please don't sue me."
  />
  <figcaption>
    <strong>@microsoft</strong> Please don't sue me.
  </figcaption>
</figure>

Feel free to [open an issue on GitHub](https://github.com/jakejarvis/y2k/issues) if you run into connection glitches or have any nostalgic inspiration for software you think would be cool to install persistently on the OS image. I certainly can't help with any actual Windows Me crashes, though — it was beyond help a long, long time ago. Like, [the day it came out](https://books.google.com/books?id=Jbft8HXJZwQC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA76#v=onepage&q&f=false). But it will always have a soft spot in my heart.

Anyways... quarantine boredom is a crazy thing, am I right? 😷