Do you have that Windows 3.1 version that came with the Compaq that had the DE that was like a paper folder instead of an empty desktop, and that you could put the icons in the different tabs of the paper folder?
I had to Google and it does look like it, I remember the computer would boot into it and it also had space for a few (three?) icons outside the tabs (like in the “desktop”). It was a cool interface!
That doesn't answer his question.. looks like there isn't a comprehensive list of what's actually included. Maybe for legal reasons but that's just a guess.
Maybe it falls under the "Various hobby/alternative OSes up to some very recent ones" category. I'm not going to download a one hundred gigabyte file to find out though...
I can't figure out how to find a list and I believe that's intentional to avoid simplistic copyright search and takedown type of problems. It is aggravating how little information is available on the website.
1) I run my own systems in emulation and its always educational to see how other people handle configuration and sysadmin type problems. Much like programmers reading other programmer's code for educational purposes.
2) I have a genuine philosophical question which it appears I cannot answer by any means simpler than running it and trying it. Similar to the halting problem LOL. I wonder how the project handles operating systems like MVS/360 where there exists a perfectly good 1960s installation (which I have installed by hand from tape for the experience) however no one uses that IRL because the various MVS Turnkey projects provide seemingly infinite debugged and dependency organized patch sets. There's quite a difference between trying to white knuckle a homemade bare basic MVS/360 from the 1960s vs "MVS Turnkey 4" which basically just works out of the box.
Another example of #2 above is there's DEC PDP-8 OS-8 which technically boots... but the most common distro had a non-working but trivially fixable FORTRAN compiler (IIRC the runtime package filename was wrong or something similar). There's a lot of fun customization.
Another example of #2 above is I wonder how the author handles RSX-11M, distribute the ancient unpatched unmodified OS from DEC or ship something like the Billquist distro, or does the author ship the PiDP-11 RSX-11M (or is PiDP-11 shipping the Billquist RSX-11 distro now?)
I guess for people not into retrocomputing it would be like claiming some rando RedHat .iso from the 90s is "The" Linux operating system. Well, its "a" linux from one instant in time... Likewise there seems to be no "The" MVS/360 operating system there's a zillion possible local installs of all capability levels and eras, all very different and fun.
It took me a few minutes to determine that this is basically software that one can download, not a website that showcases screenshots from all those OSes. A search feature would be great, or even just a text list of all included OSes.
I'm also wondering whether/how they include OSes from devices that VICE already emulates, since that could save some work if they want to include OSes of Commodore devices.
I hadn't realized Domain/OS emulation was viable these days. It's one of the few systems that has actually "lost" features - the terminal-window-like thing (called pads, I think?) when in line mode had a dividing line at the bottom where your unconsumed typeahead was visible and you could continue to edit it until it got read - not just one line, the entire unconsumed input. (Not that it's a particularly desirable feature - it's just one that I'm pretty sure you can't implement with ptys...)
Currently the terminal doesn't really process input itself, it just gives the program running the "raw" fd.
If instead the terminal gave the processes a pipe (for instance) and consumed all the pty input itself (and its end of the pipe being a buffer of that content), why wouldn't it be the same?
Unfortunately, pre-Domain/OS AEGIS is basically lost. One person popped up with talk of imaging their 9.6 floppies, but I haven't seen anything since then.
I wonder whether this could still pop up at estate sales, or when a retiree is cleaning out their garage.
Not all gear got junked. When I was a teen intern, I got some obsolete Apollos (and 2 logic analyzers and a terminal) from my employer, and other people were also bringing home gear the company "sold" them.
Somewhere, there might well be an industry or university sysadmin or programmer who brought home a box of old QIC tapes, and one of them says "AEGIS" on the label, and it's in a garage/attic.
Also, rumor has it that at one point Boeing physically archived at least one Apollo network, because they apparently take documentation integrity extremely seriously. If that's true, they might have an engineering librarian or someone who could take an interest in making sure any versions of Aegis/Domain they need (and have preserved media for) can run on emulators or something?
Not only can you implement that with PTYs, it's how they operate by default. That's why you can telnet to an HTTP server and make a mistake and use backspace to fix it. The terminal will only send lines over. You have to use a command to put it into "raw" mode so the application gets every keystroke immediately. You have to ask for your PTY to not work that way.
Yeah I tried to tell him that the other day… I think he under estimated the popularity that this would have on HN and thought that cloudflare would be able to handle it
quite a decent collection. and actual working osses.
one that i noticed missing: Novell Netware, I spent several years in de 90s developing software for it. It was the main office network server software on those days.
3.x, 4.x ran on relatively regular 32-bit PC server hardware.
2.x ran on the 80286 in protected mode, the only OS I know which did that.
> 3.x, 4.x ran on relatively regular 32-bit PC server hardware. 2.x ran on the 80286 in protected mode, the only OS I know which did that.
My friends father worked for a shipping company and their office ran off a 286 Netware server until the early 2000's. It was a big white label tower with classic orange monochrome monitor and large Epson dot matrix printer with tractor feed paper.
But, originally wasn't it mostly a network system to support network printers and file systems?
BTRIEVE would run on top of that. But, as I understand it, Netware wasn't required. They just went together really well.
Finally, especially with Netware 386, they supported "NLMs". "Netware Loadable Modules". This was what let you deploy applications to the network server. Some databases ported to that I believe. I think Informix had a NLM version of Informix OnLine.
So, to me, early Netware seemed more an interesting network utility more so than what I, at least, would consider an "OS". Perhaps it was an OS, but just sealed off. At least until NLMs arrived, making the system more extensible.
I have no idea what facilities were available to NLMs, or how they were developed.
I think NLMs are effectively kernel modules. No memory protection, and only cooperative multitasking. So I doubt there were much in the way of limits on what an NLM could do.
I think they were usually developed in C. Metrowerks had a compiler that could build them, and Open Watcom can still do so as well.
This triggered a rabbit hole search that had me rediscover Packard Bell Navigator[1]. The nostalgia and joy this page brings me is hard to describe. I hope everyone remembers their formative tech journey so fondly.
Oh this is that this was called. A long time ago, like in Googles earlier stages, I tried so hard to find this from my memory, but I failed and over the years forgot about it. Thanks for bringing it up again.
I never experienced it but somehow I still feel nostalgic for it. For all we've gained there's so much we've lost as well, I'm sad my kids won't grow up with anything like this.
For all we've gained... the social media site I have the healthiest relationship with is basically just text and would run fine on a machine from 1998. Sure, some parts of modernity are nice (I don't miss having to call taxi companies) but I could do without a lot of it.
Oh, this made me dig up a memory: What was that skeuomorphic music player Packard Bell would bundle with Windows 3.1? It looked like a stack of stereo equipment with a CD player, MIDI player and wav player/recorder. When I was a kid I loved how it looked like a stereo system and grabbed a copy from a friend. I also remember being greatly disappointing when it would not run on Windows 95.
Impressive curation effort. One comment: at least a few of the examples in the gallery seem to be of the "last, greatest" version, which actually isn't necessarily the greatest, and definitely not the most interesting.
For example, the "Domain_OS SR10.4 - 01 VUE desktop" is a bit confusing, and may cause people to miss actual DomainOS.
Apollo DomainOS (or Domain/IX, or simply Domain) had many unique and interesting things about it, but disappeared soon after being acquired by HP. It looked more like it might look if you took a programmer who had mostly only seen text terminals, and gave them a megapixel display with pixel framebuffer, a mouse, and the freedom to design the keyboard hardware, and told them to make what they would want to use.
VUE (around when the Unix workstation vendors collaborated on standarding on a common desktop environment) was for HP-UX , which was a very different operating system, and entirely different user experience. More of an early attempt at let's give non-power-users an accessible computer with virtual desktops and everything.
Similarly, Solaris had innovative OpenWindows (including but not limited to a networkable display system based on PostScript) before they got the common desktop environment.
SunOS 4.x (retronym "Solaris 1.x") and earlier could run the earlier SunView environment, which was more like monochrome early Mac than the later Open Look look and feel of OpenWindows.
A Mister does a good job of recreating period appropriate load times and quirks. You can put it in whatever old computer case you're most nostalgic for, connect an old CRT monitor and most peripherals should have some USB converter if necessary.
I just love passion projects like this. One person does a ton of work because they care about the thing, and then shares it with the world so everyone can enjoy it.
I would suggest to crop your screenshots down to the OS being featured. It's a bit confusing to see a picture labeled as IBM AIX but then see GNOME 2 window decorations everywhere.
Pardon a simple question - this implies nested virtualization, or is the second step emulation?
The download is a Linux VM, gotcha.
Are other OS-s nested virtual machines inside that Linux VM, or emulators (in which case, holly mackerel, that is even more impressive :O... and also why??).
Readme seems to imply it's emulators, but it also uses the words "virtual/virtualization" or "VM images" liberally sprinkled.
I imagine the author's using OpenSIMH (https://opensimh.org) or something similar, so it'd be an emulated CPU running the userlands.
I have a container that runs a 4.3 BSD userland using opensimh; it's not super hard to set up, just takes a bit of patience and willingness to learn how opensimh works.
I wrote a SunTools front end to a simulation hosted on a VAX. I don't recall how we moved the data back and forth (serial port of some kind, most likely). I also can't recall "what it was like using SunTools and SunView". Just that, whatever or however it was done, I managed to get it to work. :)
My first actual job was working for a local health authority here in the UK, and they had a Pick computer running some database application thing, I think to do with accounting. I had to run the backups. Sorry to be a whinger, I don't mean to belittle the monumental amount of work.
Similar experience here. I worked on an ERP system for a chemical distributor that ran on 5 Honeywell Ultimate systems distributed across the US. General ledger, order management, warehouse order pick lists, chemical recipes, MSDS data, inventory, etc. We synced database updates every night, and once a month someone had to spend the night in the datacenter swapping 9 track tapes for backups.
I loved working in Pick BASIC on those systems. So much you could do with "dict items"
Ha. My first SW job interview was for a programmer on a Pick system at some small company in Manhattan. I think they were involved in publishing or something. Anyway, the salary they offered was so pitifully low all I could do was politely decline. Was too young to even know that I could negotiate.
“Microsoft Bob was a Microsoft software product intended to provide a more user-friendly interface for the Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows NT operating systems, supplanting the Windows Program Manager.“
For those experience with some of these OS, what might be something to explore (try) on these OS for some learning objective. Any call outs feature wise?
HeliOS and transputers is one of the most interesting systems ever; if you use Golang and/or know 9front and concurrency you'll be at home, because it was concurrent and multicore literally by design where the CPU 'cores' synced themselves with messages.
This is a great resource. Did you run into any weird emulation quirks with the older OSes? I imagine getting some of them to boot wasn't straightforward.
Amazing project - and you actually fulfill a dream of mine (to have a collection absolutely all historically interesting UNIX-like OSes in VMs available on demand).
I'll dig through my collection of "abandoned" OS distros to see if I have something that could make an addition to your museum.
a1o | 5 hours ago
[OP] andreww591 | 5 hours ago
Avamander | 5 hours ago
a1o | 2 hours ago
philistine | 2 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssob-7sGVWs
simianpirate | 5 hours ago
a1o | 2 hours ago
AnimalMuppet | 5 hours ago
juvoly | 5 hours ago
hoansdz | 5 hours ago
newer_vienna | 5 hours ago
TheSkyHasEyes | 5 hours ago
ktm5j | 5 hours ago
forinti | 4 hours ago
newer_vienna | 4 hours ago
ktm5j | 2 hours ago
f311a | 5 hours ago
ZebusJesus | 4 hours ago
leoxiv | 3 hours ago
nonamenoslogan | 3 hours ago
xstas1 | 2 hours ago
pfcd | 5 hours ago
ChrisArchitect | 5 hours ago
WillAdams | 4 hours ago
ChrisArchitect | 5 hours ago
SkiFire13 | 5 hours ago
cf100clunk | 4 hours ago
VLM | 2 hours ago
1) I run my own systems in emulation and its always educational to see how other people handle configuration and sysadmin type problems. Much like programmers reading other programmer's code for educational purposes.
2) I have a genuine philosophical question which it appears I cannot answer by any means simpler than running it and trying it. Similar to the halting problem LOL. I wonder how the project handles operating systems like MVS/360 where there exists a perfectly good 1960s installation (which I have installed by hand from tape for the experience) however no one uses that IRL because the various MVS Turnkey projects provide seemingly infinite debugged and dependency organized patch sets. There's quite a difference between trying to white knuckle a homemade bare basic MVS/360 from the 1960s vs "MVS Turnkey 4" which basically just works out of the box.
Another example of #2 above is there's DEC PDP-8 OS-8 which technically boots... but the most common distro had a non-working but trivially fixable FORTRAN compiler (IIRC the runtime package filename was wrong or something similar). There's a lot of fun customization.
Another example of #2 above is I wonder how the author handles RSX-11M, distribute the ancient unpatched unmodified OS from DEC or ship something like the Billquist distro, or does the author ship the PiDP-11 RSX-11M (or is PiDP-11 shipping the Billquist RSX-11 distro now?)
I guess for people not into retrocomputing it would be like claiming some rando RedHat .iso from the 90s is "The" Linux operating system. Well, its "a" linux from one instant in time... Likewise there seems to be no "The" MVS/360 operating system there's a zillion possible local installs of all capability levels and eras, all very different and fun.
kmoser | an hour ago
I'm also wondering whether/how they include OSes from devices that VICE already emulates, since that could save some work if they want to include OSes of Commodore devices.
theYipster | 5 hours ago
eichin | 5 hours ago
glhaynes | 4 hours ago
compsciphd | 3 hours ago
Currently the terminal doesn't really process input itself, it just gives the program running the "raw" fd.
If instead the terminal gave the processes a pipe (for instance) and consumed all the pty input itself (and its end of the pipe being a buffer of that content), why wouldn't it be the same?
bilegeek | 3 hours ago
[1]https://www.facebook.com/groups/retrocomputers/posts/7062462...
neilv | 2 hours ago
Not all gear got junked. When I was a teen intern, I got some obsolete Apollos (and 2 logic analyzers and a terminal) from my employer, and other people were also bringing home gear the company "sold" them.
Somewhere, there might well be an industry or university sysadmin or programmer who brought home a box of old QIC tapes, and one of them says "AEGIS" on the label, and it's in a garage/attic.
Also, rumor has it that at one point Boeing physically archived at least one Apollo network, because they apparently take documentation integrity extremely seriously. If that's true, they might have an engineering librarian or someone who could take an interest in making sure any versions of Aegis/Domain they need (and have preserved media for) can run on emulators or something?
jerf | 11 minutes ago
Teever | 5 hours ago
Are there any any operating systems that you'd like to add to the collection but haven't been able to find?
Maybe someone here at HN could help with that.
sdbillin | 5 hours ago
Teever | 3 hours ago
dmitrygr | 3 hours ago
So far on retry/resume #12, 97.3/120GB done (i am live updating this comment as long as i can)
morphle | an hour ago
dmitrygr | an hour ago
and it is not resuming ...
#23, 118.5/120GB and going againmorphle | 26 minutes ago
nlitsme | 5 hours ago
one that i noticed missing: Novell Netware, I spent several years in de 90s developing software for it. It was the main office network server software on those days.
3.x, 4.x ran on relatively regular 32-bit PC server hardware. 2.x ran on the 80286 in protected mode, the only OS I know which did that.
Copies can be found at archive.org.
MisterTea | 2 hours ago
My friends father worked for a shipping company and their office ran off a 286 Netware server until the early 2000's. It was a big white label tower with classic orange monochrome monitor and large Epson dot matrix printer with tractor feed paper.
whartung | 2 hours ago
But, originally wasn't it mostly a network system to support network printers and file systems?
BTRIEVE would run on top of that. But, as I understand it, Netware wasn't required. They just went together really well.
Finally, especially with Netware 386, they supported "NLMs". "Netware Loadable Modules". This was what let you deploy applications to the network server. Some databases ported to that I believe. I think Informix had a NLM version of Informix OnLine.
So, to me, early Netware seemed more an interesting network utility more so than what I, at least, would consider an "OS". Perhaps it was an OS, but just sealed off. At least until NLMs arrived, making the system more extensible.
I have no idea what facilities were available to NLMs, or how they were developed.
davidgnz | an hour ago
I think they were usually developed in C. Metrowerks had a compiler that could build them, and Open Watcom can still do so as well.
liquidise | 4 hours ago
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Bell_Navigator
quietfox | 4 hours ago
AlecSchueler | 4 hours ago
Keyframe | 4 hours ago
CalRobert | 2 hours ago
MisterTea | 2 hours ago
prettyjosn | 4 hours ago
TrackerFF | 4 hours ago
cf100clunk | 4 hours ago
neilv | 4 hours ago
For example, the "Domain_OS SR10.4 - 01 VUE desktop" is a bit confusing, and may cause people to miss actual DomainOS.
Apollo DomainOS (or Domain/IX, or simply Domain) had many unique and interesting things about it, but disappeared soon after being acquired by HP. It looked more like it might look if you took a programmer who had mostly only seen text terminals, and gave them a megapixel display with pixel framebuffer, a mouse, and the freedom to design the keyboard hardware, and told them to make what they would want to use.
VUE (around when the Unix workstation vendors collaborated on standarding on a common desktop environment) was for HP-UX , which was a very different operating system, and entirely different user experience. More of an early attempt at let's give non-power-users an accessible computer with virtual desktops and everything.
Similarly, Solaris had innovative OpenWindows (including but not limited to a networkable display system based on PostScript) before they got the common desktop environment.
SunOS 4.x (retronym "Solaris 1.x") and earlier could run the earlier SunView environment, which was more like monochrome early Mac than the later Open Look look and feel of OpenWindows.
delichon | 4 hours ago
dchftcs | 4 hours ago
dfxm12 | 4 hours ago
kramit1288 | 4 hours ago
erickhill | 4 hours ago
strrl | 4 hours ago
iluvcommunism | 2 hours ago
FergusArgyll | 52 minutes ago
jolmg | 46 minutes ago
FergusArgyll | 8 minutes ago
cortesoft | 3 hours ago
tankenmate | 3 hours ago
iberator | 3 hours ago
StayTrue | 3 hours ago
https://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/humor/Unix/os-suck.html
yard2010 | 3 hours ago
macOS sucks, but it's pretty
bkircher | 2 hours ago
jschveibinz | 3 hours ago
nonamenoslogan | 3 hours ago
drittich | 2 hours ago
llsf | 3 hours ago
This is a treasure trove. And glad you made the whole museum downloadable, so this treasure does not get lost.
Narishma | 3 hours ago
semireg | 3 hours ago
themadturk | 57 minutes ago
Evidlo | 3 hours ago
kingleopold | 3 hours ago
NikolaNovak | 3 hours ago
The download is a Linux VM, gotcha.
Are other OS-s nested virtual machines inside that Linux VM, or emulators (in which case, holly mackerel, that is even more impressive :O... and also why??).
Readme seems to imply it's emulators, but it also uses the words "virtual/virtualization" or "VM images" liberally sprinkled.
gwynforthewyn | 3 hours ago
I have a container that runs a 4.3 BSD userland using opensimh; it's not super hard to set up, just takes a bit of patience and willingness to learn how opensimh works.
rogster | 3 hours ago
whartung | an hour ago
justmarc | 3 hours ago
This preservation of old OS is important.
Spread the word, this needs to reach anyone who's interested in it.
simonh | 3 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system
My first actual job was working for a local health authority here in the UK, and they had a Pick computer running some database application thing, I think to do with accounting. I had to run the backups. Sorry to be a whinger, I don't mean to belittle the monumental amount of work.
CalRobert | 2 hours ago
patja | an hour ago
I loved working in Pick BASIC on those systems. So much you could do with "dict items"
HeyLaughingBoy | an hour ago
sagarp | 2 hours ago
Someone | 2 hours ago
“Microsoft Bob was a Microsoft software product intended to provide a more user-friendly interface for the Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows NT operating systems, supplanting the Windows Program Manager.“
salted-cacao | 2 hours ago
jzer0cool | 2 hours ago
wattzee | 2 hours ago
DrBurrito | an hour ago
HeyLaughingBoy | an hour ago
[edit] No, found it!
rcakebread | 32 minutes ago
anthk | an hour ago
https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv4n4/transputer.html
They were pretty much ahead of time with multiprocessing.
ike____________ | an hour ago
danborn26 | an hour ago
drewg123 | an hour ago
Postosuchus | 34 minutes ago
I'll dig through my collection of "abandoned" OS distros to see if I have something that could make an addition to your museum.