6 Retro Computing Websites That Boot Old OSes in Your Browser
Modern browsers are fast enough to emulate entire PCs from the 80s and 90s at full speed. That means you can re-experience Windows 95 booting up, replay a Winamp visualizer, or poke at an IBM PC XT running VisiCalc — without installing anything. The six sites below cover the full spectrum, from meme-grade parodies to serious digital preservation archives. All you need is a browser tab.
Windows 93
Windows 93 is the internet's favorite parody operating system — a fictional version of Windows that never existed, built entirely in HTML5. It boots a full desktop with a start menu, draggable windows, and dozens of weird little apps with names like Void, Defrag, and Cat Explorer. Half the joke is that everything is slightly off; the other half is how convincingly it nails the 90s UI grammar. It's the lightest entry on this list — open the URL and you're instantly in. Don't miss the secret apps hidden in the file manager.
98.js
If Windows 93 is a meme, 98.js is a love letter. It's an open-source reimplementation of the Windows 98 interface in pure JavaScript — no emulation, no images of an old desktop, just the actual Win32 widget behavior rebuilt from scratch. Every gradient, every beveled button, and that signature chime when you open My Computer are coded by hand. Minesweeper, Paint, Notepad, Sound Recorder, and even Dr. Watson all work. It's a serious piece of frontend engineering disguised as nostalgia.
Webamp
Webamp is a browser replica of Winamp 2.x — the MP3 player that defined an era of Napster-era music piracy — complete with the classic default skin, playlist editor, and the all-important MilkDrop-style visualizer (powered by the Butterchurn project). It can load audio files from your machine or stream demo tracks. The fidelity is uncanny: right-click the title bar and you get the same context menu you remember. For anyone who spent 1999 ripping CDs and downloading skins from 1001winampskins.com, this one stings a little.
EmuOS
https://emupedia.net/beta/emuos/
EmuOS goes further than a desktop skin: it boots through a fake Award BIOS POST sequence, complete with the memory test, PCI device table, and that "Press DEL to enter SETUP" line that everyone read but no one ever understood. After the BIOS it loads a choice of Windows 95, 98, or ME themes, each preloaded with emulators and retro games. The whole experience is designed to feel like turning on a Pentium II machine in 1998, down to the CRT-friendly timing. It's the most theatrical entry on the list.
PCjs Machines
PCjs is where nostalgia meets serious preservation. It's a real IBM PC emulator written in JavaScript, maintained since the mid-2010s by Jeff Parsons, with a catalog of original hardware (IBM PC 5150, PC XT, PC AT, COMPAQ Portable) running original software: VisiCalc 1981, Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Word 1.15, MS-DOS 1.0 through 6.22, Windows 1.0 through 95, OS/2, even PDP-11 minicomputers and TI programmable calculators. Every entry is a clickable museum piece with documentation. If you want to show someone what a 1981 spreadsheet felt like, send them here.
v86
v86 is the deep end. It's a full x86 PC emulator that runs entirely in the browser via WebAssembly, and it ships with one-click profiles for over a hundred operating systems: Windows 1.01 through Windows 2000, MS-DOS 6.22 with Doom and Sim City, FreeDOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Haiku, ReactOS, SerenityOS, Plan 9, Oberon, and dozens of tiny hobby OSes — including chess and Tetris implementations that fit in a 512-byte boot sector. Disk images load on demand; nothing is uploaded to a server. It's the closest thing on the web to having a time machine with a folder full of boot floppies.
These six sites together form a small tour of how the web has learned to remember old computers — some as jokes, some as engineering showcases, some as genuine archives. Open a couple in background tabs the next time you need a five-minute break.