Relive the glory days of Windows 98 right in your browser | usagoldmines.com

If the sight of a boxy, dull-beige desktop and a floppy disk drive gives you a weird little rush of nostalgia, then Desktop98 is about to blow your mind.

It’s a free Windows 98 simulator that runs in your browser. Not only does it give you the desktop nostalgia, it goes well past that, making you feel like you actually sat down at a computer in 1998. I can just hear the gentle buzzing of the CRT monitor in the background and smell the molten hot Pizza Rolls.

With Desktop98, you can fire up AOL and listen to a 56K modem screech its way onto the internet. You can open Winamp—remember that? You can browse the web in Internet Explorer or, better yet, Netscape Navigator. All of the browsers link to real archived pages from the era through the Wayback Machine. That means that Geocities, Yahoo, AltaVista, and my personal favorite, Ask Jeeves, are all available to browse.

Beyond just the retro-nostalgia of the early internet you can also use old programs like MS Paint, Minesweeper, and Solitaire. There’s even DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D emulators. They run through DOS emulation, so you can play the original games in a browser tab.

Probably the most ambitious throwback is the AOL recreation, which includes chat rooms, instant messages, Buddy Lists, and yes, “You’ve Got Mail.” The chat rooms mix real Desktop98 users with AI characters playing people from 1998. They stay in character and outright refuse to acknowledge that any year after 1998 exists. It’s kitschy, but also kind of delightful.

If you lived through this era, then Desktop98 is about as close as you’ll get to a time machine back to the golden days—minus your mom yelling at you to get off the internet because she needs the phone.

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