Yes, you could log in as the system user by clicking “cancel” on the “enter your username and password” box. (It was Internet Explorer, but iirc Internet Explorer was actually good around about that time.) It also came with mshta.exe, for HTML Applications HTAs were basically like Electron, but built into the OS, so you didn't have loads of insecure Chrome versions clogging up your RAM and hard drive. Windows 98 came with Active Desktop: you could display bits of website on your desktop as widgets (e.g. (They had a global lock and full privileges, though, so it's not really much of a sandbox.) Windows 98 SE included its own kernel-based virtual machine system, which it used for multi-tasking DOS and “sandboxing” DOS drivers.

Nobody else does this! (The best help UI ever made, and Microsoft just dropped it…) In Windows 98 SE, there was a button next to “minimise” that would give every widget a tooltip explaining what it did and how to use it most programs came with a built-in, GUI instruction manual. Worse UI, worse memory use, worse hackability… Yet it remains my favourite operating system of all time, because everything else (yes, even precious Debian!) is just worse. I could probably hit the comment limit listing them. Windows 98 Second Edition is terrible in many ways.

It also reminds me the well known Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than ( ) Hats off if you can do the same to Windows98 and shrink it to 5MB. There was no sound support, no plug&play, no unnecessary tools, nothing. There was not a single file that I could remove without breaking it, I have edited a lot of registry and INI files to disable features to let me remove as much as possible.

I was left with something like 20MB (? I assume, I don't remember exactly). I have spent a number of days iterating moving some Windows files, restarting to see if it still boots and does the job, restoring the files if it did not. I remember I was left with something like 70MB of usable disk space and most of it was devoted to Delphi 2. I put up an ambitious (back then) plan to map out all broken sectors and then try to fit Windows 95 and Delphi2 onto the rest. My only HDD was 120MB Conner Peripherals HDD that fell on asphalt out of jacket pocket of my friend while he was riding a bike (no kidding!) and was crisscrossed with bad sectors. My first PC I ever owned was scrap gathered from my friends.

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