I had the pleasure of spending the last week in Orlando with my girlfriend. We basically went on every ride at every park in the entire city. So on Friday night we decided to take a drive down to Downtown Disney and check out DisneyQuest, an interactive themepark with some interesting VR games, but which ultimately equates to a glorified Dave N Busters.

One contraption really caught our attention as we are both huge roller coaster fanatics. It is called Cyberspace Mountain. Briefly, it is a roller-coaster simulator whereby the patron starts off by creating a roller-coaster track of their own using a touch screen and a simplified coaster track producer application (starring Bill Nye the Science Guy). Once finished, your track is saved to the server and accessed by your own personal access card. You then wait in line for 30 minutes or so (a short wait by Disney standards), after which you can “ride” your coaster in a simulator pod that features full 360 degree, 2 axis rotation. Very cool concept. This is not meant to be a critique but I must say, neither of us have ever been more sick.

Now on to the interesting part. I noticed the line was moving a little slow and after glancing down the hall at the pods I noticed that Pod 1 was not in use and had the words “idle” on the screen (the pods have outer screens so you can preview your coaster before taking the (barf) plunge. Now eventually the operator called in the repair guy. So in my geekness I watched intently as he starting playing around with the pod’s computer display. First he pressed something which brought up the config screen – similar to the ones you would see when starting up an arcade machine from the early 90’s. The all of a sudden I saw it!! SCANDISK. Yes that is correct the whole pod was rebooted and the loveable old Windows Scandisk program starting running, blue screen and all.

At this point I got really excited though I was not sure what to make of it. I had not seen this in years and given that I recently switched to Mac, never thought I would see it again. So I watched closely and as the utility finished I asked my girlfriend for the camera. And there it was. The Windows 95 startup screen. I was so excited and frightened all at the same time (remember we were in line at this point and had not yet started our ride). Was this advanced VR 3D hydraulic spinning contraption really being controlled by Windows 95? That’s 13 year old software is it not? Well luckily I got the pic below to prove it.

If the above image is broken try this one: Image

I realize that some of you may think this is an old picture but I assure you I took it myself on July 27th 2007 and I can provide proof. If you tell me how. I will post the date-stamped photo when I get a chance.