Virtually Fun

WRP [1] implements exactly that and it works with browsers that are much older than IE 5. The author has a write-up about how it got made with some curious screenshots of ancient browsers at [2], [3] (parts one and two). One downside to WRP is that because it uses images with an image map for the rendered pages the content are not searchable.

There's also Opera Mini for Java ME. It reflows the websites for what screen resolution it's running at, usually quite well, and gives you searchable text. It's intended for featurephones but I once got a legacy version of it to run on an old laptop with Linux for fun with Microemulator [4].

Of course, an administratively simpler option would be to have the old machines access a server running the users' an entire desktop with a modern browser, PDF viewer and the like using remote desktop software. I arranged this kind of setup with a Linux server and a Windows client for a legacy workstation at work and it proved quite usable. Out of all the major remote desktop software that would run on old Windows (VNC clients, Remote Desktop, NX) the RealVNC client proved the easiest on the client machine's CPU in our setup.

If you had to absolutely make it happen from within the browser you could employ a VNC Java applet but that would be to the detriment of user experience. For security and privacy you can tunnel VNC over SSH.

[1] http://www.tenox.net/out/#wrp

[2] http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=3866

[3]…

ReactOS re-implements the WinNT series (XP+) OS kernel (you can compare it with UNIX vs. Linux) and WINE provides the user mode layer.

Visual Studio 2010 and the dotNet Framework work fine in WINE: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=892 . VS run as early as 2003 in ReactOS: http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Screen-Shot-2013-11-29-at-7.27.55-AM.png

As ReactOS also supports the Windows graphic card driver from NVidia, AMD and Intel - it's for sure an upcoming alternative to Windows. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS
. Beside that more and more Indie-game-developers support Mac & Linux (PR via Humble Bundle), and beside Indie: GOG and Steam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(hardware_platform) ) are going strong too.

Say you wanted to make a film set in 1997? You could probably buy a period computer easily enough from eBay, you could probably get Windows 95 on there with Internet Explorer 4, but to display some content? You could make some Photoshop mockups for period 'Google', 'CNN' et all, but to actually serve those pages would require a period server. This little trick of rendering would make it all slightly easier for the film maker. They would not have to hand millions over to ILM just to make a few retro screenshots.

Personally, if I was making a film set in the 1990's I would go for the IBM WebExplorer browser (http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/webexplorer.png). It has awesome graphics.

I just opened my Red Book and reread «Short history of UNIX».
Berkley University bought license for AT&T UNIX[1] in 1977. They started to develop their own software for UNIX and distribute it, so this variant of UNIX is called BSD. Then they decide to remove and rewrite original AT&T code, due to license and associated costs, and released 4.3BSD[2], which then used by BSD flavors.

So BSD is UNIX, but it contains no AT&T code today.

[1] http://www.nordier.com/v7x86/index.html
[2] https://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/category/4-3-bsd/