Windows 98 just got USB 3 and Thunderbolt drivers, 28 years late

Windows 98 went on sale on June 25, 1998, according to Wikipedia, and in 2026 it can read a Thunderbolt NVMe drive. Yeo Kheng Meng released a driver called xHCI98 that gives Windows 98 SE, ME, 2000, XP, Vista and 7 working USB 3, with experimental support for USB4 and Thunderbolt 3 and 4. Hackaday headlined it “Thunderbolt Strikes Windows98,” which is about right.

It started with a laptop he didn’t want to give up. Hackaday reported in September that he likes Windows 98, but he also likes his 2020 ThinkPad, which only has an xHCI USB controller, and nothing existed to make the two get along. Hackaday says he decided to do it himself, or at least guide LLMs through writing the drivers. On his blog, Yeo writes that this time he decided to go further and give the driver both USB 3 and USB4/Thunderbolt support.

The speeds are the fun part. The project’s GitHub page reports about 210 MB/s read and 256 MB/s write on Windows 98 SE, against 1,151 MB/s read and 1,013 MB/s write on Windows 7, and says Windows 98’s own storage stack is the bottleneck, not the Thunderbolt link. Hackaday adds that Windows 98’s 64 KB maximum request limit likely holds USB 3 to around 200 MB/s.

If you’ve got a retro PC project, I’d read the warnings before the speed chart. Yeo writes that apart from the Thunderbolt 3 traffic he captured on his ThinkPad P14s Gen 1, everything else is still theoretical, and the USB4 side has only been tested against an emulator. Hackaday says the Thunderbolt support isn’t as stable as the USB 3 part. The GitHub page tells XP users to keep a PS/2 or built-in keyboard handy, and warns that unplugging a drive can lose cached writes. I’d try it on a machine you can afford to reinstall, with a copy of anything you care about somewhere else.

Windows 98 never had it this good.