Live Out Your Operating System Nostalgia With The Restart Page

Live Out Your Operating System Nostalgia With The Restart Page:

Here on the Internet, you’ll see a whole lot of nostalgia – old movies, old music… Pokémon. It’s all here, and if it doesn’t affect the rest of your life too much, there’s nothing wrong with living in the past (just don’t get too carried away, now).

With all that said, a little site called The Restart Page is definitely worth taking a looksie if you have a few minutes of your time. You won’t have an extended stay here (unless you’re really intrigued with the start-up functions of various operating systems), but it’s worth checking out.

Sure, It May Be One-Time-Use…

Basically, The Restart Page is a website full of varying OS windows that are all of the shut-down/restart/sleep nature. However, rather than just be still images, they are all fully functional. Click “shut down” on one of them, and your browser instantly simulates the shutdown or restart process that the particular operating system would be using.

Usually, this is the part of the article where I’m supposed to say, “Sure, The Restart Page looks like it doesn’t have any real use, but it actually does this…” Well….that’s not going to happen today. The Restart Page serves no legitimate purpose whatsoever in your life. Basically, you can live without it – it’s just a bunch of pretty (and not-so-pretty) images.

However, it takes you back in a way. It shows where we came from as far as technology goes, and it even throws in some extra operating systems that you might not even consider slapping on there (NeXT anyone?). Granted, like I said, this only a site for visual purposes and nothing practical. It’s more-so oddball entertainment, but at the same time, it somewhat preserves the history of computers.

….But It’s Awesome!

So… I’m just going to go ahead and say it. This site is still really cool. For some reason it is rather satisfying sitting through the different start-up functions of each operating system (and to think you would sometimes complain about how long it took to for these things to boot – now you’re doing it for fun).

Right off the bat, there are about seventeen of these operating systems to choose from. I’m not really sure how if will affect the speed of your browsing (as in I don’t know if this is an emulator-type site or one that only uses animations), but it’s worth checking out.

Heck, one thing you may want to try is going full-screen with one of these puppies and convincing your friends that you somehow got Windows 2000 on your Mac (you can actually kind of do this if you hit “cancel” on all the other restart windows, drag the ones that won’t disappear to the bottom of the page, scroll up, and drag the one you want to the center of the screen. At first glance it looks kind of funny).

Conclusion

Well, that’s that, MUOlians. The Restart Page is one of those things you should share on Facebook or Reddit and instantly make everyone think you’re much more charming and appealing than you actually are. Kind of like alcohol.

Do you know of any other sites that emulate old technology? Have you used The Restart Page for pranks?