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.
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...)
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 just received from a retired engineer, a binder of 8” floppies that says Jan 1984, AEGIS 6.0 / Mentor 3.0, Full Backup, WBAK. The owner got them from a dumpster 40 years ago, but suspects someone just reused the binder to store blank floppies. Anyhow I’m working on it.
I’ve also found source for an AEGIS menu system (mouse, hotkeys) written in Forth.
it's probably not old enough, but in the mid 90s i acquired a working apollo domain workstation that was functioning as a doorstop at a university library. it came with a full set of documentation, but no floppies, i think. i don't know which version, and i don't know if it is still working now. it's gathering dust at my mothers home in europe.
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?
Yeah, MAME has had working Apollo emulation since around 2010. Domain/OS is definitely pretty odd. You could almost mistake SR10 for a normal functional Unix if you use the SysV or BSD universes rather than the AEGIS one, but while it is clearly Unix-like, it's also quite Multics-like as well and is pretty distinct from the typical functional Unix family.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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"
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!
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 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.
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.
I vaguely remember using that UI. It's in that strange category of preset graphical menu launchers that were a bit more than an autoexec shell menu but much less than an OS. File it under "ideas that seemed like they might be good in concept... but were too limited in practice."
I think I got it on an early Packard Bell Pentium system in 1994. I remember I used it even though it sucked because it seemed a little better than Windows 3.1 mostly due to the fact it didn't try to look like a functional windowing operating system. Once I got my hands on Win95 beta, I never ran it again. Of course, early Win95 also sucked as a real OS but it was enough better than Win 3.1 that I could slowly begin to transition off my beloved Amiga 2500.
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.
That was Voyetra Audiostation, and I definitely remember having it on the Packard Bell 486 that was my family's first computer (which was already obsolete when we got it, since we got the cheapest machine they had; it was on clearance sale). While I do have Windows 3.10 and 3.11 for Workgroups images, I don't (yet) have one with Audiostation. I have sometimes thought about trying to find the closest PB master CD ISO to the one that came with that machine and install it, but just haven't gotten around to doing that yet (still got lots of other stuff to install).
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.
What I find interesting about projects like this is how much of the OS "feel" doesn't survive emulation. The visual layer comes through fine, but the things that actually defined the experience — keyboard click latency, the specific mouse acceleration curves of period hardware, the way a CRT scanline gave System 7 fonts a totally different texture than a sharp LCD does, the audible click-thunk of Atari ST or early Mac dialogs — none of that gets preserved.
Run System 7 in an emulator and the menus look right, but the input feels wrong. What we're really preserving in these collections is the screen output, not the interaction. Which is fine for an archive — just worth being honest it's a museum of appearances, not of use.
Is there a proper full list without needing to download the very big ZIP archive file?
I don't know if it includes "every operating system I can think of". I can think of some things: TempleOS, BTRON (there might be more than one implementation; I know of an (apparently) abandoned FOSS implementation), Serenity OS, and some others that I do not remember what they are called.
Also, what might be useful for preservation is, in addition to the files and emulation, also the documentation for programming those operating systems. There would also be such a thing of consideration as documentation of old computers (including their instruction sets), which might be a separate project but potentially might be useful in combination with this.
Another thing would be somehow you can download individual systems together with information about the emulation, in case you want to use your own emulators for it instead of installing an existing collection with its own installers and launchers etc.
Some people mention uncommon features (and features that work in an unusual way). I think that would be worth making a article about too, and just because a feature is common does not necessarily make it good.
I haven't yet included a full list, but I guess I could include one.
All of those OSes you mentioned are included. BTRON isn't a single OS, but a small family of OSes based on a common specification (just like Unix is); the OS museum includes the demo 1B/V3 and Chokanji 4. The FOSS BTRON implementation you're thinking of is almost certainly B-free/EOTA, which is also included. EOTA never actually implemented BTRON proper before it got abandoned. It basically just ended up being like a Unix based on an ITRON kernel.
Documentation for some OSes is included, although I've focused more on user/administrator documentation over developer documentation. It would probably be a good idea to include developer documentation though.
I've thought about making individual images available for download, but many of them are dependent on particular emulator versions and/or the common launch scripts so it isn't quite that simple.
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.
NetWare 4.11 and 6.5 are included, but just don't have any screenshots on the site (the screenshots are not exhaustive at all and just a small sampling of what's there).
And even though there weren't very many 286 protected-mode OSes there were still several of them, with the OS museum including:
1B/V3 (a Japanese OS with an object-oriented desktop and extensive compound document support, part of the TRON project)
Microport SysV/AT
Prologue TwinServer (an obscure French OS that originated on 8080/Z80)
Multiple versions of OS/2 1.x
QNX 2.21
QNX 4.0
IBM PC XENIX
1B and TwinServer are especially notable since they were maintained as 286 OSes long after x86-32 machines had made 286 machines completely obsolete; the last versions apparently being in 1997 for 1B and 2002 for TwinServer (although the last version of TwinServer has some limited support for 32-bit code, it can still run on a 286)
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.
> 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.
Nice. Reminds me of Frame of Preference, with embedded emulators for all major MacOS, placed on top of images of the machines they ran on, with effects to simulate the grain and color of those machines, and with scripted "goals" and easter eggs.
I wish I could do that, but there are a lot of emulators that don't have web versions, and the launcher and related scripts are very heavily dependent on a Unix-like OS and there is no way to port them to JS (a completely separate launcher and scripts would have to be written).
It sucks that there's no good way to port Linux directly to WASM UML-style, since WASM insists on implementing memory safety at the bytecode level with no way to bypass it. There is a very limited port, but it doesn't support paging. Not all the emulators would run on a full-featured WASM port if one existed, but that could be dealt with by just using user-mode QEMU to run whichever ones are x86-only.
Wish it was a bit more searchable but still a great effort.
I am always on the hunt for AST, which was like, a vendors custom shell for Windows 95 but sold\included as if it was an OS in its own right. Its been eaten by history I think.
Oh man, this is absolutely amazing. I’ve built a much smaller project with 13 vintage OSes running in the browser, and even at this scale the amount of fiddly work involved was stupidly high. Doing this for 1700+ systems is crazy! Nice work.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Several different SIMH forks are included, along with a lot of other emulators; there are well over 150 different emulators, with some having multiple versions and variants present to handle things like regressions related to specific OSes.
Nested virtualization for certain x86 OSes running in QEMU is supported, although you will have to enable it manually (VirtualBox has a checkbox for this in its settings). For VMs that support it, the QEMU launch scripts will automatically use KVM if available and fall back to TCG if nested virtualization isn't enabled.
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
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.
Multiple versions and variants of OS-9 are included. There are images for NitrOS-9 on CoCo and Dragon, several ports of OS-9/6809, OS-9/68K 2.4 for X68000, and OS-9000/x86 6.1.
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. :)
The last version of TempleOS is included, but I installed it myself, and I didn't bother to include most of the images that I just installed by myself in the credits.
I'm also planning to add earlier versions as well as the later forks at some point.
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.
The vast majority were downloaded. A few I got when I exchanged compilation DVDs with someone in Finland in 2006 and 2009 (I uploaded the images on those to BetaArchive back then and they've made their way onto various other sites). The only ones that I have that were installed from images I dumped from original media that hadn't been previously shared were LynxOS 4.0 and MaxOS Linux (not to be confused with macOS, it was an obscure early-2000s commercial Slackware fork from a company that was semi-local to me; the CD was given to me back then by somebody at a long-defunct local computer store).
“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.“
I'm not aware of any fully working TENEX images unfortunately. There are partial images, but last time I checked they weren't in a state that was even remotely usable.
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...
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.
Helios unfortunately isn't yet included. Last time I checked the Transputer emulator doesn't support the special Helios I/O server protocol, which is different from the one that the usual occam software used. It's on my long list of emulators/OSes to fix/finish though.
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.
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...)
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.
[1]https://www.facebook.com/groups/retrocomputers/posts/7062462...
I just received from a retired engineer, a binder of 8” floppies that says Jan 1984, AEGIS 6.0 / Mentor 3.0, Full Backup, WBAK. The owner got them from a dumpster 40 years ago, but suspects someone just reused the binder to store blank floppies. Anyhow I’m working on it.
I’ve also found source for an AEGIS menu system (mouse, hotkeys) written in Forth.
it's probably not old enough, but in the mid 90s i acquired a working apollo domain workstation that was functioning as a doorstop at a university library. it came with a full set of documentation, but no floppies, i think. i don't know which version, and i don't know if it is still working now. it's gathering dust at my mothers home in europe.
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?
Yeah, I'd definitely like to see older versions of AEGIS as well
Yeah, MAME has had working Apollo emulation since around 2010. Domain/OS is definitely pretty odd. You could almost mistake SR10 for a normal functional Unix if you use the SysV or BSD universes rather than the AEGIS one, but while it is clearly Unix-like, it's also quite Multics-like as well and is pretty distinct from the typical functional Unix family.
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.
why could you not implement it as 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?
What an amazingly goofy (but also kinda maybe makes sense?) feature!
No Pick?
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.
What a legendary name for the developer.
Omg, I am dead. Dick Pick. That is the best name, not just for a developer :D
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.
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"
I've got Pick PC R83 V3.1 included. The screenshots on the front page are a very small sampling of what's there.
How can I speak with the heavens if you don't have temple OS.
exactly this. no throne is more fit for Claude!
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?
Your comment reminds me of HP's obscure EFI OS called QuickLook. I would guess there are a lot of obscure OSs out there.
I'd watch this if I were you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssob-7sGVWs
Oh, yeah! I think ASUS also had something like that at some point.
I believe you are speaking of Tabworks?
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!
I don't think I've heard of an alternate shell/launcher like that before. Do you remember what it was called?
Windows still (well, Win2000) lets you build a custom shell, just replace explorer.exe (and a bunch of other work).
I've heard of custom shells for Windows before, but not that specific one
Is there a way to see a list of the operating systems included without having to download and run the tool?
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 hope so, and also that it is a plain black-and-white list.
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.
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.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Bell_Navigator
I vaguely remember using that UI. It's in that strange category of preset graphical menu launchers that were a bit more than an autoexec shell menu but much less than an OS. File it under "ideas that seemed like they might be good in concept... but were too limited in practice."
I think I got it on an early Packard Bell Pentium system in 1994. I remember I used it even though it sucked because it seemed a little better than Windows 3.1 mostly due to the fact it didn't try to look like a functional windowing operating system. Once I got my hands on Win95 beta, I never ran it again. Of course, early Win95 also sucked as a real OS but it was enough better than Win 3.1 that I could slowly begin to transition off my beloved Amiga 2500.
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.
The maturity brought upon us homogenized experience. 90's user interfaces were something else, man.
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.
That was Voyetra Audiostation, and I definitely remember having it on the Packard Bell 486 that was my family's first computer (which was already obsolete when we got it, since we got the cheapest machine they had; it was on clearance sale). While I do have Windows 3.10 and 3.11 for Workgroups images, I don't (yet) have one with Audiostation. I have sometimes thought about trying to find the closest PB master CD ISO to the one that came with that machine and install it, but just haven't gotten around to doing that yet (still got lots of other stuff to install).
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.
What I find interesting about projects like this is how much of the OS "feel" doesn't survive emulation. The visual layer comes through fine, but the things that actually defined the experience — keyboard click latency, the specific mouse acceleration curves of period hardware, the way a CRT scanline gave System 7 fonts a totally different texture than a sharp LCD does, the audible click-thunk of Atari ST or early Mac dialogs — none of that gets preserved.
Run System 7 in an emulator and the menus look right, but the input feels wrong. What we're really preserving in these collections is the screen output, not the interaction. Which is fine for an archive — just worth being honest it's a museum of appearances, not of use.
While we're discussing obscure operating systems, can anyone else remember an obscure Unix where uid 0 was called "avatar" instead of root?
It's one of those strange memories from my youth that I've been unable to confirm as an adult.
https://www.lysator.liu.se/hackdict/split/avatar.html
It would be great if there was a list of OSes in the collection.
An amazing, herculean effort! thumbs up to Andrew
This preservation of old OS is important.
Spread the word, this needs to reach anyone who's interested in it.
Reminds me of the alt.sysadmin.recovery canonical list of operating systems that suck.
https://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/humor/Unix/os-suck.html
> NextStep sucks, but it's pretty.
macOS sucks, but it's pretty
Linux sucks differently every time a kernel is released.
Is there a proper full list without needing to download the very big ZIP archive file?
I don't know if it includes "every operating system I can think of". I can think of some things: TempleOS, BTRON (there might be more than one implementation; I know of an (apparently) abandoned FOSS implementation), Serenity OS, and some others that I do not remember what they are called.
Also, what might be useful for preservation is, in addition to the files and emulation, also the documentation for programming those operating systems. There would also be such a thing of consideration as documentation of old computers (including their instruction sets), which might be a separate project but potentially might be useful in combination with this.
Another thing would be somehow you can download individual systems together with information about the emulation, in case you want to use your own emulators for it instead of installing an existing collection with its own installers and launchers etc.
Some people mention uncommon features (and features that work in an unusual way). I think that would be worth making a article about too, and just because a feature is common does not necessarily make it good.
I haven't yet included a full list, but I guess I could include one.
All of those OSes you mentioned are included. BTRON isn't a single OS, but a small family of OSes based on a common specification (just like Unix is); the OS museum includes the demo 1B/V3 and Chokanji 4. The FOSS BTRON implementation you're thinking of is almost certainly B-free/EOTA, which is also included. EOTA never actually implemented BTRON proper before it got abandoned. It basically just ended up being like a Unix based on an ITRON kernel.
Documentation for some OSes is included, although I've focused more on user/administrator documentation over developer documentation. It would probably be a good idea to include developer documentation though.
I've thought about making individual images available for download, but many of them are dependent on particular emulator versions and/or the common launch scripts so it isn't quite that simple.
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.
Copies can be found at archive.org.
NetWare 4.11 and 6.5 are included, but just don't have any screenshots on the site (the screenshots are not exhaustive at all and just a small sampling of what's there).
And even though there weren't very many 286 protected-mode OSes there were still several of them, with the OS museum including:
1B/V3 (a Japanese OS with an object-oriented desktop and extensive compound document support, part of the TRON project) Microport SysV/AT Prologue TwinServer (an obscure French OS that originated on 8080/Z80) Multiple versions of OS/2 1.x QNX 2.21 QNX 4.0 IBM PC XENIX
1B and TwinServer are especially notable since they were maintained as 286 OSes long after x86-32 machines had made 286 machines completely obsolete; the last versions apparently being in 1997 for 1B and 2002 for TwinServer (although the last version of TwinServer has some limited support for 32-bit code, it can still run on a 286)
Mind, I never used Netware.
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.
> 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.
Nice. Reminds me of Frame of Preference, with embedded emulators for all major MacOS, placed on top of images of the machines they ran on, with effects to simulate the grain and color of those machines, and with scripted "goals" and easter eggs.
https://aresluna.org/frame-of-preference/
That 'nearly' is important. I can think of one operating system that you cannot possibly have access to, because it was never published. (-:
This is stellar. I've been doing this for a few years myself, but I thought I was killing it with like 70ish OSs. Thank you for all your work!
And I thought I was killing it just saving some install disk images!
Also might be of interest: http://www.typewritten.org/
Nice! They have HP's NewWave (which I was always fond of)
Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104428
The rarest possible choice for Amiga (Amiga UNIX) represented. Curious thing to do. Fun project site either way.
Would've been cooler if the emulator was implemented within the browser itself, lke DistroSea, or Archive.org.
I wish I could do that, but there are a lot of emulators that don't have web versions, and the launcher and related scripts are very heavily dependent on a Unix-like OS and there is no way to port them to JS (a completely separate launcher and scripts would have to be written).
It sucks that there's no good way to port Linux directly to WASM UML-style, since WASM insists on implementing memory safety at the bytecode level with no way to bypass it. There is a very limited port, but it doesn't support paging. Not all the emulators would run on a full-featured WASM port if one existed, but that could be dealt with by just using user-mode QEMU to run whichever ones are x86-only.
Fantastic. Ignore any complainers--what is here is great, and having it nicely collected is hugely valuable.
I have long held anxiety that many of these would vanish as certain university archives disappeared. It is nice to see them protected.
My first operating system and GUI was GEOS on the Commodore 64. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
Mine as well. Felt like I imagined a Mac felt like (I was Mac-envious in those days).
Wish it was a bit more searchable but still a great effort.
I am always on the hunt for AST, which was like, a vendors custom shell for Windows 95 but sold\included as if it was an OS in its own right. Its been eaten by history I think.
Oh man, this is absolutely amazing. I’ve built a much smaller project with 13 vintage OSes running in the browser, and even at this scale the amount of fiddly work involved was stupidly high. Doing this for 1700+ systems is crazy! Nice work.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Several different SIMH forks are included, along with a lot of other emulators; there are well over 150 different emulators, with some having multiple versions and variants present to handle things like regressions related to specific OSes.
Nested virtualization for certain x86 OSes running in QEMU is supported, although you will have to enable it manually (VirtualBox has a checkbox for this in its settings). For VMs that support it, the QEMU launch scripts will automatically use KVM if available and fall back to TCG if nested virtualization isn't enabled.
Thx! You got a new, albeit small scale, patreon - this is awesome :)
I loved those solaris machines in our department lab!
Could really do with a torrent. 120GB at 3MB/sec...
If my download ever finishes i'll spin up a torrent.
So far on retry/resume #12, 97.3/120GB done (i am live updating this comment as long as i can)
#16, 115/120GB
and it is not resuming ...
#23, 118.5/120GB and going againall mine broke of and wouldn't resume but became 7k broken zip files.
in for a torrent/magnet link as well
posted above.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:24badf9996920185291b39f209cd820aa87fda0d&dn=virtual_os_museum-2026.05.19-full.zip&ws=http%3a%2f%2fdownloads.virtualosmuseum.org%2fvirtual_os_museum-2026.05.19-full.zip&ws=https%3a%2f%2fdownloads.virtualosmuseum.org%2fvirtual_os_museum-2026.05.19-full.zip
seeding now. please seed too :)
much appreciated!
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
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.
Yeah, they're very common. Some emulators like QEMU and MAME have many different versions included in order to deal with regressions.
Scrolling is extremely laggy.
Some of these are runnable in the browser, for example here: https://copy.sh/v86/
Very impressive! Thank you for doing this.
No AIX?
PC/IX 1.0, AIX PS/2 1.3, and AIX/6000 4.3.3 are included; I just didn't post any screenshots of them.
Searched, but could not find OS/9.
[edit] No, found it!
Multiple versions and variants of OS-9 are included. There are images for NitrOS-9 on CoCo and Dragon, several ports of OS-9/6809, OS-9/68K 2.4 for X68000, and OS-9000/x86 6.1.
Ran it on a 32k/64k Color Computer.
This is wonderful. I'm looking forward to looking thru it properly. My earliest "real computer" memories are VAX/VMS and SunTools...
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. :)
Not a single OS/2 screenshot..
Just a couple of years ago I worked for a client who had a computer with Solaris 2.x running. It was quite a critical piece in the system.
I don't see HAL or WOPR or Skynet or GLaDOS.
THANK YOU!
This is a treasure trove. And glad you made the whole museum downloadable, so this treasure does not get lost.
VMS? I didn't see it listed.
Several older versions of VMS are included, with the latest being 7.3 for Alpha.
Now add VR support and we can visit this museum and be like in a Tron movie. You can even charge a fee anyone entering musium usin VR ;-)
I don't see TempleOS here unfortunately https://gitlab.com/virtualosmuseum/virtualosmuseum/-/blob/ma...
The last version of TempleOS is included, but I installed it myself, and I didn't bother to include most of the images that I just installed by myself in the credits.
I'm also planning to add earlier versions as well as the later forks at some point.
Blog post: https://andreww591.blogspot.com/2026/05/ive-released-virtual...
Where is EMACS?
I'd love to go back to the 90s and live it again.
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 think something got into my eye.
love this stuff. please change the color scheme asap
Great work! please just offer dark mode
Hug of death? Error code 522 on downloads.
quite impressive, how did you collected? just find images online or you actually have all of these OS.
The vast majority were downloaded. A few I got when I exchanged compilation DVDs with someone in Finland in 2006 and 2009 (I uploaded the images on those to BetaArchive back then and they've made their way onto various other sites). The only ones that I have that were installed from images I dumped from original media that hadn't been previously shared were LynxOS 4.0 and MaxOS Linux (not to be confused with macOS, it was an obscure early-2000s commercial Slackware fork from a company that was semi-local to me; the CD was given to me back then by somebody at a long-defunct local computer store).
Where's Microsoft Bob?
That wasn’t an operating system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob:
“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.“
TENEX and TOPS-20 would be nice
TOPS-20 4.1 and 7.1 are both included.
I'm not aware of any fully working TENEX images unfortunately. There are partial images, but last time I checked they weren't in a state that was even remotely usable.
tops20 is avalible to use at sdf.org :)
I didn't see ryOS
Reposting from iluvcommunism who's shadowbanned
One can also click on their timestamp then click "vouch".
I did, I think it needs more than one vouch. Was still dead after I vouched anyway...
https://os.ryo.lu/ Quite cool.
Wow. That was a bit of nostalgia, just to read some of the names.
Yeah! Browsing through the screenshots truly feels like watching vintage porn.
You can only view the operating system, you can't view those websites again, haha.
Is TempleOS in here?
I ran to the comments with this question
https://virtualosmuseum.org/readme/#whats-included
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 knoow right?! Wonder how much bandwidth they user per month and how much it costs them.
Or a search option. That would be nice.
Here you go: https://github.com/andarazoroflove/VMs/releases/download/1.0...
Could not find it.
Blasphemy, all shall know the power of Holy-C! Sad that he struggled in life like he did and the way it ended, he was a brilliant programmer.
It's still good that his memory lives on though. Even in communities where technology isn't the focus I still see mentions of him from time to time.
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.
https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv4n4/transputer.html
They were pretty much ahead of time with multiprocessing.
Helios unfortunately isn't yet included. Last time I checked the Transputer emulator doesn't support the special Helios I/O server protocol, which is different from the one that the usual occam software used. It's on my long list of emulators/OSes to fix/finish though.
Very neat to see this project come to completion Andreww.
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.
This is awesome.
This is great