When I was a kid in the 1990s I remember the first times I used my dad’s computer and it was running Windows 3.1, it changed my life and just the interface with the icons was so magical. One of my dreams actually was to have my own “icon” or well just a program in the program manager. Which I think is what led me to coding.

Like most kids back then, it looked something like this:

Another moment I remember was the first time I saw the internet. A friend of my brother visited our house for a LAN party and he had to download a driver for a network card I think. He took his modem out, connected the telephone plug in our outlet, opened WinSock and the modem sound started playing.

He was focused on downloading the driver files, but I was shocked seeing the internet for the first time. And kept asking him to visit all the sites (URLs) I heard existed from television. Like TMF chat, the Dutch music television channel’s chat. He opened it and it was an actually interactive website and I was shocked:

I wanted to recreate this experience to keep it alive. Many people when they get to this stage of nostalgia will buy old computers and put them in their house. But that’s kinda limited. I want EVERYONE to experience the classic Windows computer and be able to do stuff with it.

And most importantly it should have 24/7 internet connectivity to be part of the modern internet. Because there’s other DOS and Windows emulators on the web but none of them have actual internet connectivity. Which is the most magical part of all of this to me. Because with some hacking you can still use lots of programs like Netscape, Internet Explorer, mIRC etc. to access the modern day internet. Because the foundations of the internet haven’t changed since then, it’s still mostly TCP/IP connections, even after 30+ years.

Most of my time was actually spent on Windows 95, 98, XP, Vista and 7, and then I switched to a MacBook Pro when I went digital nomad in 2013. But Windows 3.1 was my first real introduction to GUI computing so it holds a special place in my heart :D