That’s not a typo. Windows 96 promised to build on the success of Windows 95, yet it never materialized as originally intended.
I only learned about this a few months ago. To me, this was an incredibly fascinating discovery and wanted to write about & share it.
This is a very good article, but this part peeved me on a petty level (as well as explaining why there’s precious little in the way of screenshots):
The opportunity to do a little investigative journalism is right there, and the blog author didn’t take it
Hi, author here 👋. Thanks for the feedback. If the Internet Archive had it on their own VM to run, I would’ve tried playing with it and taken some screenshots. However, I simply did not have the time to get it running locally on my machine, especially because I’m all Mac and Virtual Box doesn’t run on M-series hardware.
I agree it’s a missed opportunity, but I chose to go a little bit of an easier route.
Thanks for reading and enjoying the other 99% of the article. 😉
UTM is the way to go on modern Macs, and even iOS/iPadOS too! Free, built on QEMU and super easy to spin up virtual machines with any architecture.
https://mac.getutm.app/
Based on your descriptions of the integration between Windows 96 and Office, I did get the feeling you might run into even more issues if more software wasn’t installed alongside Windows as well.
I had no idea!
And hopefully my comment didn’t come across as a dig against your article - it just promises to be a potentially fascinating follow-up. Especially when, even today, Windows Explorer feels like it added previews of files as little more than an afterthought (and occasionally as a PowerToy).
BTW I enjoyed 100% of your article, I think it’s a good sign when it leaves the reader wanting more!
Thank you! It didn’t come off as a dig at all. Trust me, I thought about it and spent about an hour on Internet Archive looking for a version that ran on its site. But nothing was there and I learned the hard way last year that Virtual Box is still in the Intel era, so it’s useless for me.
I did look into UTM as others are saying, but based on its description it may not be able to run an OS that far back. Something to look into down the line.
Either way, again, thanks for reading my work. I really do appreciate it. There’s some other old Microsoft goodies I’ve written in the past, like this commercial introducing Excel.
UTM is your friend in lieu of Virtualbox