epochutils is a working museum of developer tools — and every museum deserves a period room. Windows 95 mode redraws the entire site as a 1995 desktop: teal wallpaper, gray beveled windows, a Start menu, a taskbar with a live clock, and all 37 tools laid out as pixel-art desktop icons.
Free, client-side, and reversible — the Start menu's Settings ▸ Designer mode brings you back here whenever the nostalgia wears off.
What Is Windows 95 Mode?
It's the same epochutils you already use — an epoch & Unix timestamp converter, JSON formatter, Base64 encoder, JWT decoder, regex tester, hash and UUID generators, diff, cron parser, and about thirty more — rendered as a faithful Windows 95 desktop instead of a modern web page. Double-click a desktop icon and the tool opens in its own draggable, resizable window with a navy title bar and the classic minimize / maximize / close buttons. Open several tools at once; each gets a taskbar button, exactly the way multitasking felt in 1995.
The details are the point: the four-pane Start flag, the 2×2 dither on a pressed task button, the etched separators, the pixelated MS Sans Serif face, menus that highlight in navy, and a Shut Down… entry that ends, as it must, with "It's now safe to turn off your computer."
Why Build a Retro Desktop of Developer Tools?
epochutils has a dual purpose. It's a set of fast, practical utilities — no ads, no accounts, no backend, everything computed in your browser. But it's also a museum: as day-to-day programming shifts toward AI-driven workflows, we think the small tools developers reached for a thousand times a year deserve to be preserved as artifacts, not just retired. Windows 95 mode is that idea taken literally — the tools exhibited in the interface of the era that shaped them.
The Same Tools, Nothing Watered Down
Windows 95 mode is a skin, not a toy version. Every tool is the real one: the timestamp converter converts, the hash generator hashes, the regex tester matches live. Your data never leaves the browser — there is no server to send it to. The Start menu's Programs submenu lists all 37 tools, Documents remembers the ones you opened recently, and Find opens the same quick tool search (Ctrl+K) as the modern look.
How to Turn It On (and Off)
Click the launch button above, or open any epochutils page with ?look=win95 in the address bar. Your choice is remembered on this device, so the desktop greets you on your next visit. To return to the modern editorial look, open Start ▸ Settings ▸ Designer mode — or just search "Designer" in the tool palette. It works on phones too, where windows go full-screen and the Start menu becomes a sheet.