I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of

Yeah, I should probably add screenshots of earlier versions of those (or in the case of Domain/OS, screenshots of dm).

Rather than just another name for Domain/OS, Domain/IX was actually a Unix compatibility layer that was an add-on product for pre-SR10 AEGIS versions, with SR10 merging it into the base OS (pre-SR10 had no built-in Unix compatibility).

AFAIK even though it's usually associated more with HP-UX, VUE actually originated at Apollo before HP bought them, although I'm not sure if they ever actually released it before the acquisition.

I wrote software for Robinson Helicopter using Pick up till the early 2000s. They used it for the production, manufacting and inventory control. It was based on a system called PRO:MAN.

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"

What a legendary name for the developer.

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.

When I was a young broth of a boy I worked as a field engineer looking after a whole bunch of different hardware. One of these was a Pick machine with its own dedicated Pick branded hardware, amongst a fleet of terminals and early PC hardware. Nothing ever seemed to go wrong with it.

I've got Pick PC R83 V3.1 included. The screenshots on the front page are a very small sampling of what's there.

As a former Data General engineer, I too would like to see some love for RDOS and AOS. And also their diagnostic tool ADES which was a specialised OS in its own right, and ICOS.

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...

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.

What an amazingly goofy (but also kinda maybe makes sense?) feature!

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?

I really love my C64 Maxi - it's a little ARM board running a custom version of (AFAIK) VICE, but it is shaped like a C64/VIC-20/C16. Mine has the VIC-20 colors and keycap titles (the keycaps have the C64 shape though, and caps lock doesn't lock).

It "feels right".

I wish we could have USB versions of period appropriate keyboards such as the VT-100/200/300, the ADM-3A, Apollo, Xerox Star, Symbolics, Apollo Domain etc, as I believe a lot of the realism is the physical parts of the machine you actually touch.

The screen is important, but if you have a fast-refresh HDR monitor, you'll be close enough. Many more recent machines had keyboards that were very close to modern ones and didn't any have special keys absent from a PC-104/105 key one. Mice are also relatively easy, as few machines had very different kinds of mice.

I tend to associate the Amiga with razor-sharp interlaced displays, so seeing 640x400 noninterlaced in an emulator leaves something missing. The Amiga also had an unusually smooth mouse response due to its interrupt prioritization and use of hardware sprites for the mouse cursor. I had never seen a mouse move as buttery-smooth as it did on the Amiga. Again, this is not captured via emulation; not even my MiSTer seems to get it right.

exactly this. no throne is more fit for Claude!

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 believe you are speaking of Tabworks?

I don't think I've heard of an alternate shell/launcher like that before. Do you remember what it was called?

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.

+1 for this feature. And being able to download specific OSes instead of the entire 121GB zip file.

I hope so, and also that it is a plain black-and-white list.

https://ia601001.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/18...'

You are basically expanding the zip file, and you can pick and choose.

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.

> Packard Bell Navigator is an alternative shell for the Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 operating systems

Huh. I thought the term "shell" generally referred to command line interfaces to the OS and that Unity's way of describing itself as a graphical shell was some "new" (2011) generalization of the term, but I guess there is at least this precedent for using the word like that.

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.

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.

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.

Is PC/GEOS (GeoWorks Ensemble) in there ? Or does it count as a DOS application ?

Mine as well. Felt like I imagined a Mac felt like (I was Mac-envious in those days).

> NextStep sucks, but it's pretty.

macOS sucks, but it's pretty

Linux sucks differently every time a kernel is released.

Ah yes, Scary Devil Monastery (which also sounds like it'd make a pretty sweet Doom map).

Since there is a multitlude of whatabout...

Oberon?

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.

> 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.

And I thought I was killing it just saving some install disk images!

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.

The abstract list, which is pretty complete is here:

https://virtualosmuseum.org/readme/#whats-included

Nice! They have HP's NewWave (which I was always fond of)

Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104428

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've now added some torrents to the download page (using archive.org as a web seed).

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)

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

The laggy scrolling and glowy visual design make me think that this site was vibe-coded. Badly.

Yeah, they're very common. Some emulators like QEMU and MAME have many different versions included in order to deal with regressions.

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.

I want the opposite: something like https://infinitemac.org/ but 100% downloaded and local.

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. :)

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.

Several older versions of VMS are included, with the latest being 7.3 for Alpha.

Although Emacs commonly refers to an editor, It was always so very much more: It is a compiler, an editor, a pain-in-the-arse, one of the most brilliant uses of the blurring of the layers of App/os/hardware. Its a lisp editor, a lisp development environment, a lisp machine, an OS, Its a database, a word processor, a calculator... the only things in computer science that It is not is a spread sheet, and a paint program, but do not say that too loud or someone will write a macro for it that does both of these things, in some weird way, you will have visions of Phillip K. Dick.

Oh, and did I say it was also a threaded-mail reader? A threaded-news reader?

Oh, and lastly, Emacs is a torture device.

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.

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.

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).

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 :)

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.

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.“

Yeah! Browsing through the screenshots truly feels like watching vintage porn.

Reposting from iluvcommunism who's shadowbanned

  https://os.ryo.lu/ Quite cool.

https://os.ryo.lu/ Quite cool.

I ran to the comments with this question

Here you go: https://github.com/andarazoroflove/VMs/releases/download/1.0...

Could not find it.

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.