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title, date, description, tags, image, draft
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| I Made A Thing, Powered by Windows Me™ | 2020-06-06 10:05:23-0400 | Introducing Y2K Land: fully featured, fully isolated, on-demand Windows Millennium Edition® virtual machines. |
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images/screenshot.png | false |
{{< gh-buttons username="jakejarvis" repo="y2k" >}}
A few months ago, I stumbled upon my first website ever on an old floppy disk. Despite the instant cringing, I uploaded it to GitHub, collected other iterations, and made an #awesome-list of others who were brave and/or shameless enough to do the same. But why not take that one 1,000 steps further?
Introducing y2k.land — with fully-featured, fully-isolated, on-demand Windows Millennium Edition® virtual machines, simply to experience my first website in its natural Internet Explorer 5 habitat. And maybe play some 3D Pinball: Space Cadet. Oh, and Microsoft Bob is there too if you want to say hello and catch up. 🤓
{{< image src="images/screenshot.png" link="https://y2k.land/" >}}Enter Y2K Land, at your own risk.{{< /image >}}
The backend is powered by QEMU (as a Pentium III emulator), websocketd (an awesome lightweight WebSockets server written in Go), Cloudflare Tunnels (for some protection), and embarrassingly messy Ruby and shell scripts. I'll push those up to GitHub next to the frontend code — which is based on noVNC, a JavaScript VNC client — once I have a chance to untangle the spaghetti code. 🍝
I must give credit to both charlie.bz and 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?
{{< image src="images/windows-me.png" width="320" alt="Windows Millennium Edition®" >}}@microsoft Please don't sue me.{{</ image >}}
Feel free to open an issue on GitHub if you run into connection glitches or have any inspiration for nostalgic stuff 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. But it will always have a soft spot in my heart.
Anyways... quarantine boredom is a crazy thing, am I right? 😷