Want to Run Windows 95 on Your Mac? There’s an App for That

For many of us, just looking at pictures of Windows 95 is enough to induce nostalgia. And actually playing around with the dated OS is even more of a trip down memory lane.

Of course, if you’re using a modern Mac, running Windows 95 is not that easy of a proposition — until now. Windows 95 is now available as an app you can download and use on macOS, Linux and newer Windows computers.

Felix Rieseberg, a developer for Slack, has created a Windows 95 environment in an Electron app that can run on the aforementioned operating systems.

When it launched, Windows 95 was seen by many as the pinnacle of computer user interfaces. Nowadays, it looks amusingly dated. But it’s still fun to play around with.

All of the old school apps you may be familiar with — from MS Paint to Minesweeper — are available. Unfortunately, while Internet Explorer is present, it reportedly doesn’t work.

Amazingly, the Electron app only takes about 200 megabytes of RAM with all of the apps, games and Windows 95 utilities open and running. If the system glitches out for any reason, you can simply start a new instance of the operating system.

As Rieseberg put it in a tweet, “It’s a terrible idea that works shockingly well. I’m so sorry.”

The Slack developer has made the source code and app installer for the Windows 95 Electron environment available on Github. All in all, the app is 129MB in size and is fairly easy to get up and running, depending on which OS you’re using.

Once you download and install the app, you just need to run it and it’ll open the Windows 95 software in a new window. It won’t have access to any of the files on your actual machine, but you can play around with the apps we mentioned previously.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t a sanctioned app from Microsoft. As such, you’re downloading and running it at your own risk. That being said, it’s probably worth the nostalgia.

This isn’t the first time that someone has taking painstaking measures to bring Windows 95 back. Back in 2016, an intrepid developer got the old school OS to run on an Apple Watch.