My Applets are disabled (Score 1)

Sorry if this post winds up somewhere random, am a first time poster and this site is quite frankly not intuitive. Anyway, question is: web pages with applets are not working- the applets anyway. Is this something MS did. I am using Win98 but have done some product downloads from their site recently. how do I check? I've gone to internet tools, options... and can't see that anything has been disabled. Is it hidden somewhere else? Thanks in advance