Someone just ported thousands of apps to Windows 95, because time is a flat circle

• Back-porting .NET to Windows 95 allows thousands of apps to run on an ancient operating system.
• MattKC’s video “I ported THOUSANDS of apps to Windows 95” educates and entertains viewers on performing this challenging feat.
• Despite the massive task involved, MattKC’s project is a nostalgic love letter to the operating system that sparked his interest in computers.

If Windows has ever driven you nuts over something like a missing DLL file, you’ll know how much of a pain it can be to get everything working properly again. But what if you were trying to implement a system on a version of Windows that never supported it in the first place? If that thought is enough to give you a headache, you’ll appreciate how someone back-ported an entire system from Windows 98 to Windows 95, thus allowing thousands of apps to run on the older operating system.

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The challenge of back-porting .NET onto Windows 95

This awesome feat was made possible by MattKC on YouTube. If you’ve never seen MattKC before, their videos usually involve deep-diving into some hardware or software and seeing what makes it tick. This can range from decompiling a Sonic game to purchasing and resurrecting broken consoles. This time, he’s back with a video titled “I ported THOUSANDS of apps to Windows 95,” where he works on making lots of apps compatible with the ancient operating system.

The biggest hurdle was getting .NET running on Windows 95. Not only did .NET come out when Windows 98 was the new kid on the block, but Windows 95 never had any work done on it to back-port it onto the system. As such, MattKC had the mammoth task of getting .NET to work with Windows 95, presented in a video that’s both educational and entertaining. It’s a great watch, even for people who would have zero idea where to start with a project like this.

While it is an impressive feat, it still begs the question; why would you ever do this? Well, as MattKC puts it, he did it mostly for himself. A lot of his childhood memories stemmed from using Windows 95, and he always wondered how people managed to come together to build an entire operating system together. As such, this project is like the ultimate love letter to the system that got him interested in computers in the first place, and we think that’s a perfectly good reason to do anything.