You can run over 1,000 Windows 3.1 programs in your browser
The Internet Archive is back doing what it does best.
The Internet Archive has spent many years gathering and storing digital content from the past. It now hosts millions of web pages, texts, videos and audio snippets, but recently the site expanded its collection to include software, or more specifically, games. After making more than 2,400 DOS titles available to play in the browser, the Internet Archive has embraced the GUI and done the same for Windows 3.1.
It's kicked things off by adding more than 1,000 programs to its Windows 3.1 Software Library. The vast majority of them are games, including Taipei and Ski Free, but there's plenty of browser-based shareware to get stuck into. There's also a curated collection called the "Windows Showcase," which lists some of the best known programs and games from 20 years ago.
It's been made possible by Boris Gjenero's EM-DOSbox emulator, which converts Windows runtimes into JavaScript code that can be interpreted by your browser. It's what underpins the Archive's DOS collection and testers have already used it to boot Windows 95. That suggests we may only have to wait a short while to see more Windows programs added to the collection.
