1996 chat room simulator connected to Win95 and System 7 web desktops

henrychannel•about 3 hours ago

A zero-account browser chat room mimicking mid-90s online services.

The state runs on Upstash Redis and is shared across three different frontends (React/Vite deployed on Vercel):

* The standalone chat interface (https://lolchat.rip)

* A Windows 95 simulator (https://56k.rip)

* A Mac System 7 simulator (https://dialup.rip)

Users dialing in from the Mac desktop and users on the Win95 machine end up in the exact same rooms talking to each other.

donkey_brains•20 minutes ago

Thanks man, got me right in the nostalgia.

dmd•about 2 hours ago

maddening that you have to manually scroll

henrychannel•10 minutes ago

Fixed!

ajackfox•43 minutes ago

Satisfyingly nostalgic. Thanks.

1-6•about 1 hour ago

Dialup isn't supposed to be this smooth.

owlninja•about 1 hour ago

And a skip button breaks the immersion!

jlarocco•about 1 hour ago

I don't know... AOL chat on a 56k modem (IMO) worked better than Teams and Slack and had most of the features.

alexkkoo93•28 minutes ago

thanks for all the friends I made as MY_NAMES_JEV389. Twas fun

donkey_brains•25 minutes ago

Awesome chatting with you Jev. I never thought you were a bot despite what some people said. busysignal93

katzenq•about 2 hours ago

Vibe-coded garbage full of nonsense LLM text.

amlib•18 minutes ago

Vibe-coded or not what grinds my gears in those throwback computer interfaces is how imprecise they are. I the case of Windows, 9x had a meticulous pixel perfect alignment of widgets, great looking 2px thick bevel effects and all the proportions needed to be right for it feel "right". But almost all those throwback attempts, and specially now with AI coding, forget about this and seem to only go as far as thinking having a grey background with some tacky bevel is enough to recreate it.

NDlurker•about 1 hour ago

It's fun. Do you not like fun?

LastTrain•40 minutes ago

I do! I like sex too but that doesn’t mean I’d fuck a robot.

donkey_brains•21 minutes ago

I would! And Cthulu willing, someday I will.

NDlurker•18 minutes ago

There are real people chatting on there

rvz•about 1 hour ago

There is no use case for any of this. Most of this vibe coded garbage will get abandoned in months and the deleted.

hammycheesy•30 minutes ago

This makes me very nostalgic, but in a slightly sad way, where I remember how much better the real chat experience was back in the day.

This look-alike client struggles to show me messages in real-time. It looks like they only get pulled down in big chunks every few seconds. It also fails to scroll the new messages into view. I don't remember these sort of problems in IRC clients or IM programs of the 90s (though there were many other problems).

In a way I guess it paints the irony of modern computing, where we have several orders of magnitude more in computing power and resources, but that has only enabled us to keep rushing out perpetually unpolished, unfinished products.

It's still a bunch of fun to see a bunch of strangers talking completely unfiltered nonsense in a rudimentary chat room, though!

JojoFatsani•about 3 hours ago

Damn I had this idea but you beat me to it

orionblastar•about 3 hours ago

Looks good, reminds me of the 1990s.

Feathercrown•about 2 hours ago

AI prose everywhere. Disappointing for something that should be a labor of love.

1996 chat room simulator connected to Win95 and System 7 web desktops

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