alt.hn

5/19/2026 at 3:53:38 PM

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

 https://virtualosmuseum.org/

by andreww591

5/19/2026 at 5:22:14 PM

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.

by neilv

5/20/2026 at 1:21:48 PM

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.

by andreww591

5/19/2026 at 6:40:00 PM

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.

by simonh

5/19/2026 at 8:07:01 PM

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"

by patja

5/19/2026 at 7:28:04 PM

What a legendary name for the developer.

by CalRobert

5/20/2026 at 1:16:50 AM

Omg, I am dead. Dick Pick. That is the best name, not just for a developer :D

by smnplk

5/20/2026 at 6:30:14 AM

Just a few weeks ago I met a guy with the same first name, but his last name was Head. No joke. I spared him the jokes.

by dotancohen

5/20/2026 at 11:35:17 AM

Bet he wishes his surname was Bastard. Rich Bastard.

by dnnddidiej

5/20/2026 at 1:59:46 PM

That's great! He is a friend of a friend of my mother, I'll suggest that she call him that!

by dotancohen

5/20/2026 at 3:03:31 PM

Dick is a normal, be it old-fashioned, first name in The Netherlands.

by bkummel

5/20/2026 at 10:23:06 PM

Sure, but Dick Head is far more commonly expressed as an expletive than as a name.

by dotancohen

5/20/2026 at 1:24:07 AM

[dead]

by nullsanity

5/20/2026 at 8:29:11 AM

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.

by rcakebread

5/19/2026 at 8:16:44 PM

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.

by HeyLaughingBoy

5/20/2026 at 2:32:51 PM

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.

by teh_klev

5/20/2026 at 12:02:16 AM

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

by andreww591

5/20/2026 at 6:30:04 AM

Cool. I couldn’t find a way to search the site.

by simonh

5/19/2026 at 4:44:00 PM

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...)

by eichin

5/19/2026 at 6:33:11 PM

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...

by bilegeek

5/19/2026 at 9:55:37 PM

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.

by FarmerPotato

5/20/2026 at 3:34:58 AM

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.

by em-bee

5/19/2026 at 7:48:18 PM

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?

by neilv

5/20/2026 at 12:00:06 AM

Yeah, I'd definitely like to see older versions of AEGIS as well

by andreww591

5/19/2026 at 11:59:33 PM

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.

by andreww591

5/19/2026 at 9:43:30 PM

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.

by jerf

5/20/2026 at 9:41:33 PM

That's not the same thing - with a pty in line mode, you get one line that you can edit, and when you hit enter, it gets sent. With Domain/OS, you still get to edit your last line until you hit enter... but if the process is otherwise blocked and doesn't consume it immediately, you can up-arrow and continue editing the earlier bits too. (Pretty sure it didn't work with telnet in particular, the common cases I remember were issuing a foo;bar;baz commandline and "working on" the input to baz while foo and bar were still running.)

by eichin

5/19/2026 at 5:53:30 PM

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

by glhaynes

5/19/2026 at 5:57:09 PM

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?

by compsciphd

5/20/2026 at 9:29:41 PM

pipes buffer, and you don't know when the child is actually reading? (Maybe you could cook something up with ptrace, since it would be a blocking read in this case...)

by eichin

5/20/2026 at 1:19:30 PM

Some I would love to see:

- Convergent Technologies CTOS

- Whatever the Rational R1000 ran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_R1000)

- OS/400 (emulating an AS/400 or IBMi is problematic - not enough information available)

- Tandem's NonStop

- Stratus' VOS

- Nixdorf's NIROS/TAMOS

- Data General's RDOS and AOS. DG/UX is also kind of rare (the 88000 was a flop, but it ran on the Eclipse platform)

by rbanffy

5/21/2026 at 2:27:45 AM

DG/UX for x86, CTOS, AOS, and RDOS are already included.

I hadn't included the R1000 emulator because originally they emulated it at the logic gate level and it literally took a week to boot. It looks like they now have a more traditional instruction-level emulator that is supposedly comparable to the real hardware in speed, so I guess I should try to install that.

I think a major reason that no AS/400 emulator exists is because people are afraid of IBM sending them a C&D, although I'm not sure if IBM would care all that much if somebody wrote an emulator for IMPI AS/400s. Those haven't been supported for well over 2 decades AFAIK.

I do know somebody is slowly working on S/32 and S/34 emulators, but they haven't shared either because both apparently are still somewhat flaky. Hopefully they release them at some point. The entire midrange/office computer category is very under-preserved. The only such machines represented in the OS museum currently are HP3000 and S/3.

I've never seen images anywhere for NonStop, VOS, or NIROS, nor do emulators exist for the original hardware they ran on. Later versions of NonStop and VOS run on x86, but I'm not sure if they run under virtualization.

by andreww591

5/21/2026 at 12:35:41 PM

> DG/UX for x86, CTOS, AOS, and RDOS are already included.

Wow! Thanks. I didn't see a list of available titles, so I just shot those blindly. And I never imagined DG/UX for x86 was a thing. I'm pleasantly surprised.

> I'm not sure if IBM would care all that much if somebody wrote an emulator for IMPI AS/400s

They might complain loudly about software copyright - it's not the same thing as VM/370 and MVS 3.8j. S/32 and 34 will most likely have the same issue.

> I've never seen images anywhere for NonStop, VOS, or NIROS, nor do emulators exist for the original hardware they ran on.

NonStop and VOS under x86 might draw some fire, and they would also require emulation of the specific hardware - they run on x86, but not on PCs. As for NIROS, you are right, but Nixdorf might be more amenable to even supporting building emulators (they have a very nice museum in Germany).

by rbanffy

5/21/2026 at 2:36:37 AM

> Tandem's NonStop

I'd second this. Of course, there would need to be 3 emulators - the original proprietary CISC systems, the tightly-lockstepped MIPS systems, and the loosely-lockstepped Itanium systems.

HPE still sells NonStop on X86-64 systems now, including virtualized NonStop as a Service "cloud" offerings.

by sillywalk

5/21/2026 at 12:28:16 PM

I would avoid those amd64 ones to not draw too much of HPE's ire. I might suggest even skipping Itanic.

by rbanffy

5/20/2026 at 2:23:14 PM

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.

by teh_klev

5/20/2026 at 3:21:55 PM

I guess you don't happen to have copies of them lying around, do you?

by rbanffy

5/20/2026 at 4:08:15 PM

No, sadly not.

by teh_klev

5/19/2026 at 4:04:58 PM

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?

by a1o

5/19/2026 at 4:14:12 PM

Your comment reminds me of HP's obscure EFI OS called QuickLook. I would guess there are a lot of obscure OSs out there.

by Avamander

5/19/2026 at 7:19:11 PM

I'd watch this if I were you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssob-7sGVWs

by philistine

5/20/2026 at 11:45:45 AM

I knew what video that was going to be before I clicked it. I highly recommend watching the whole series, including more cursed OSs created because windows booted slowly (?): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLec1d3OBbZ8IBeFODHXLy...

by Elfener

5/20/2026 at 4:04:00 PM

> I knew what video that was going to be before I clicked it.

A man of culture.

by philistine

5/19/2026 at 7:06:12 PM

Oh, yeah! I think ASUS also had something like that at some point.

by a1o

5/19/2026 at 4:31:51 PM

I believe you are speaking of Tabworks?

by simianpirate

5/20/2026 at 11:54:29 AM

That sounds correct, I know what the GP is describing, very first computer for me. I was actually rather unfamiliar with the basic Win 3.1 desktop.

by xhrpost

5/19/2026 at 7:04:59 PM

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!

by a1o

5/19/2026 at 4:14:11 PM

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

by andreww591

5/19/2026 at 10:52:26 PM

Windows still (well, Win2000) lets you build a custom shell, just replace explorer.exe (and a bunch of other work).

by edoceo

5/20/2026 at 12:02:51 AM

I've heard of custom shells for Windows before, but not that specific one

by andreww591

5/20/2026 at 11:11:00 PM

HSc made an alternate file manager for Windows 2. They never ported it to Windows 3.

by ForOldHack

5/19/2026 at 7:30:46 PM

How can I speak with the heavens if you don't have temple OS.

by wattzee

5/19/2026 at 11:47:35 PM

exactly this. no throne is more fit for Claude!

by juris

5/19/2026 at 4:35:04 PM

Is there a way to see a list of the operating systems included without having to download and run the tool?

by SkiFire13

5/19/2026 at 8:34:00 PM

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.

by kmoser

5/19/2026 at 5:03:40 PM

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

by cf100clunk

5/19/2026 at 7:02:17 PM

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.

by VLM

5/20/2026 at 3:51:06 PM

> 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.

VM and MVS back then were interesting beasts. The source was available and many people customised them extensively.

I have been playing with VM/370 Community Edition for some time (https://rbanffy.github.io/fun-with-big-computers/fun-with-vm...), and it's an interesting environment. The other day I decided to make plain VM/370r6 available as a docker image (alongside my other images) and it is a very bare operating system, much less comfortable to play with than CE. The same applies to MVS 3.8j and the various community enhanced "Turnkey" editions.

by rbanffy

5/20/2026 at 3:30:39 PM

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

by kirtivr

5/19/2026 at 5:13:46 PM

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

by liquidise

5/20/2026 at 12:33:51 AM

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.

by mrandish

5/20/2026 at 5:31:57 AM

> 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.

by jolmg

5/20/2026 at 10:15:59 AM

> but I guess there is at least this precedent for using the word like that.

In Windows 3.1, the SYSTEM.INI had a setting called "shell" for overriding the default program started after Windows had loaded. Use of the word "shell" in this sense to describe a graphical interface dates back at least this far.

There was also a crude character-mode graphical interface called MS-DOS Shell, in 1988.

"shell" might be best generalised as "the first interactive program to run after boot" rather than "command line interface".

by lewiscollard

5/20/2026 at 10:55:45 AM

It's the shell around the core.

by omnibrain

5/20/2026 at 3:10:27 PM

Yes, but because CLIs came before TUIs/GUIs, I thought it only caught with CLIs until Unity (2011) adopted it for GUIs. Turns out there's been some GUIs that have used the term since Windows 3.1 and a TUI in 1988.

by jolmg

5/20/2026 at 7:16:06 AM

And right after starting that awesome little glimpse of the future, because weren't we all headed for the Max Headroom / Lawnmower Man inspired VR someday? It sure seemed inevitable - You would start up another wonder of the CD-ROM era like Encarta and just wonder at how they could have fit SO MUCH information on one computer. How could you have ever wanted for more?

Lol

Past me's head would have exploded just to have seen modern Wikipedia and GitHub back then.

by VincePlatt

5/19/2026 at 5:44:28 PM

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.

by AlecSchueler

5/19/2026 at 7:31:17 PM

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.

by CalRobert

5/19/2026 at 5:53:52 PM

The maturity brought upon us homogenized experience. 90's user interfaces were something else, man.

by Keyframe

5/21/2026 at 6:50:57 AM

> The maturity brought upon us homogenized experience.

This is "hunter gatherer experience": click an element, see if it does something (opens a link, displays a menu), see if it brings any value. Such a waste of human life.

by hulitu

5/20/2026 at 7:55:39 AM

The computing world, and not only it but also large parts of the real world, has abandoned creativity and turned into homogeneous corporatized slop.

Just look at what happened to McDonalds.

by chadgpt3

5/19/2026 at 7:24:17 PM

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.

by MisterTea

5/20/2026 at 12:15:47 AM

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).

by andreww591

5/19/2026 at 5:18:04 PM

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.

by quietfox

5/19/2026 at 6:17:36 PM

My first operating system and GUI was GEOS on the Commodore 64. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)

by semireg

5/20/2026 at 2:21:37 PM

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

by liotier

5/19/2026 at 8:57:35 PM

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

by themadturk

5/19/2026 at 8:50:34 PM

It would be great if there was a list of OSes in the collection.

by drewg123

5/19/2026 at 11:54:04 PM

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.

by INTPenis

5/19/2026 at 6:01:49 PM

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

by StayTrue

5/19/2026 at 6:11:49 PM

> NextStep sucks, but it's pretty.

macOS sucks, but it's pretty

by yard2010

5/20/2026 at 5:40:39 AM

Its called Eye candy, cheap plastic eye candy, but it sucks.

by ForOldHack

5/19/2026 at 7:15:40 PM

Linux sucks differently every time a kernel is released.

by bkircher

5/20/2026 at 4:43:09 AM

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

by bitwize

5/19/2026 at 6:44:08 PM

[dead]

by cozyman

5/19/2026 at 6:35:12 PM

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.

by justmarc

5/20/2026 at 5:41:46 AM

Since there is a multitlude of whatabout...

Oberon?

by ForOldHack

5/20/2026 at 9:09:30 PM

More specially all variants.

Oberon, Oberon System 3, Oberon-2, Active Oberon (AOS/BlueBottle), Component Pascal, Zonnon, Oberon-07

by pjmlp

5/19/2026 at 4:50:53 PM

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.

by nlitsme

5/20/2026 at 12:39:02 AM

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)

by andreww591

5/19/2026 at 7:53:44 PM

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.

by whartung

5/19/2026 at 8:17:54 PM

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.

by davidgnz

5/19/2026 at 7:29:14 PM

> 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.

by MisterTea

5/20/2026 at 10:05:00 PM

> 2.x ran on the 80286 in protected mode, the only OS I know which did that.

SCO Xenix.

Concurrent DOS/286.

DR FlexOS.

OS/2 1.x.

Coherent 2 (IIRC).

by lproven

5/20/2026 at 11:32:04 PM

FYI, those running a Proxmox system can import the two drive images from the lite distribution and run the thing as a vm without any of the other included 'baggage'. Here's how:

0: create an empty VM called osmuseum with 4 cores, 8192 MB of memory, no drives, OS type Linux 6.x - 2.6 kernel using whatever vmid fits your schedule

1: unzip the relevant part of the distribution:

   unzip virtual_os_museum-2026.05.19-lite.zip virtual_os_museum-2026.05.19-lite/VirtualOSMuseum.utm/*
2: convert the drive images in the Data directory to something understood by qemu-img:

   qemu-img convert Data/host_x86.vdi Data/host_x86.raw
   qemu-img convert Data/guest_images.vdi Data/guest_images.raw
3: import these images to whatever Proxmox storage you want to use for this VM. The host_x86 image is 250 MB, guest_images is 5 TB. Both are sparse images so they won't take up more space than actually required. I'm using 700 as vmid and ext-lvm for storage, change these to what fits your installation:

   qm importdisk 700 Data/host_x86.raw ext-lvm
   qm importdisk 700 Data/guest_images.raw ext-lvm
4: attach these images to scsi0 (host_x86) and scsi1 (guest_images) in the vm Hardware settings page

5: set the scsi0 drive as bootable in the vm Options settings page and move it up in the boot order (e.g. ide2, scsi0, net0)

6: boot the vm and change the network configuration in /etc/network/interfaces to fit your needs. In my case I changes the address for br0 to a free address on a local network segment, corrected the broadcast, network mask, gateway and dns-nameservers parameters to fit my network and restarted the networking service (service networking restart)

7: Things should now work, you may want to reboot the vm but it should not be necessary.

by Mallory_Ringess

5/19/2026 at 11:58:43 PM

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.

by jonnyasmar

5/20/2026 at 3:43:27 PM

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.

by rbanffy

5/20/2026 at 4:42:18 AM

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.

by bitwize

5/20/2026 at 9:00:04 AM

> I had never seen a mouse move as buttery-smooth as it did on the Amiga

I remember the contrast between a SPARCStation and an SGI O2 and how the O2 mouse was smoother than the Sun's. Same between Windows and Macs at the time.

Design priorities...

by rbanffy

5/20/2026 at 12:30:23 PM

This one is weird -- the problem with Suns is the mice they shipped used a really low baud rate, so they're basically "running at 20 FPS".

What's strange, is that SunOS, Solaris, and even NextStep all supported higher baud serial mice. If you look at the mouse driver on SunOS for example, you'll see the logic which loops over baud rates until it detects valid mouse data.

And Sun did ship a mouse with a higher polling rate/baud. One. The wired ball mouse for the SPARCstation Voyager.

NetBSD doesn't have the baud detection loop, so there, for this single mouse, you have to change the kernel to make it work: https://www.netbsd.org/ports/sparc/faq.html#voyager-mouse

by spijdar

5/19/2026 at 6:05:36 PM

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!

by nonamenoslogan

5/19/2026 at 7:27:55 PM

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

by drittich

5/19/2026 at 5:51:09 PM

The rarest possible choice for Amiga (Amiga UNIX) represented. Curious thing to do. Fun project site either way.

by erickhill

5/19/2026 at 6:24:50 PM

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.

by Evidlo

5/19/2026 at 10:29:27 PM

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/

by eduo

5/20/2026 at 1:15:50 PM

Sorry for the issues with downloads from earlier. The server I was trying to host it on had a failing disk. I now have torrents up, and the direct download links are to archive.org.

by andreww591

5/20/2026 at 12:33:12 AM

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.

by zzo38computer

5/20/2026 at 1:40:54 AM

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.

by andreww591

5/20/2026 at 12:57:43 PM

Fantastic job, albeit a 120 GB download is a herculean task though. I would have provided just the disk image as a separate image, most people on HN probably already know how to spin up their VMs and you can always download UTM, VirtualBox or whatever by youself without having to put it in the ZIP file

by qalmakka

5/19/2026 at 5:58:19 PM

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.

by cortesoft

5/19/2026 at 7:23:28 PM

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?

by jzer0cool

5/21/2026 at 7:13:17 AM

A lot of todays UX/UI designers have a lot to learn from these OSs.

Apollo had a "UX" which didn't get in the way of the user, customizable ( i know, not in fashion anymore). Apollo had a multitasking, multiuser network distributed OS which ran on 4MB of RAM, with 3 personalities (AEGIS, SYS V and BSD) and with a versioning filesystem.

by hulitu

5/19/2026 at 6:27:34 PM

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.

by NikolaNovak

5/19/2026 at 6:36:18 PM

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.

by gwynforthewyn

5/20/2026 at 12:50:00 AM

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.

by andreww591

5/20/2026 at 1:45:49 AM

Thx! You got a new, albeit small scale, patreon - this is awesome :)

by NikolaNovak

5/19/2026 at 4:45:41 PM

Could really do with a torrent. 120GB at 3MB/sec...

by sdbillin

5/19/2026 at 6:49:12 PM

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)

by dmitrygr

5/19/2026 at 11:41:20 PM

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 :)

by dmitrygr

5/19/2026 at 8:51:59 PM

#16, 115/120GB

and it is not resuming ...

      2026-05-19 16:23:03 ERROR 522: <none>.
#23, 118.5/120GB and going again

by dmitrygr

5/19/2026 at 9:28:10 PM

all mine broke of and wouldn't resume but became 7k broken zip files.

by morphle

5/19/2026 at 10:32:01 PM

in for a torrent/magnet link as well

by c6comp

5/19/2026 at 11:42:01 PM

posted above.

by dmitrygr

5/19/2026 at 8:41:01 PM

much appreciated!

by morphle

5/20/2026 at 1:11:34 PM

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

by andreww591

5/19/2026 at 6:03:26 PM

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

by Teever

5/19/2026 at 6:10:24 PM

Scrolling is extremely laggy.

by Narishma

5/20/2026 at 11:01:42 AM

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

by theandrewbailey

5/19/2026 at 9:20:01 PM

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.

by Postosuchus

5/19/2026 at 10:42:00 PM

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.

by dansquizsoft

5/19/2026 at 11:49:12 PM

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.

by xbar

5/19/2026 at 11:32:50 PM

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.

by protocolture

5/21/2026 at 1:12:07 PM

You missed one - V2_OS . A full OS written in assembler. Un-en-shittification at its finest!

I ran it very early in its life, got it to boot, then couldn't do much else with it :)

... and you may consider DESQview . Not quite an OS, but a precursor to Windows.

by davsti4

5/19/2026 at 4:44:34 PM

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.

by Teever

5/19/2026 at 7:17:02 PM

Some of these are runnable in the browser, for example here: https://copy.sh/v86/

by salted-cacao

5/19/2026 at 8:45:31 PM

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.

by danborn26

5/20/2026 at 1:12:22 AM

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

by andreww591

5/19/2026 at 4:09:36 PM

Wow. That was a bit of nostalgia, just to read some of the names.

by AnimalMuppet

5/19/2026 at 4:10:35 PM

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

by juvoly

5/19/2026 at 4:44:57 PM

You can only view the operating system, you can't view those websites again, haha.

by hoansdz

5/19/2026 at 11:12:56 PM

I loved those solaris machines in our department lab!

by pvelagal

5/19/2026 at 6:28:36 PM

This is wonderful. I'm looking forward to looking thru it properly. My earliest "real computer" memories are VAX/VMS and SunTools...

by rogster

5/19/2026 at 7:56:44 PM

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. :)

by whartung

5/20/2026 at 4:22:12 PM

Looks weird on mobile. I scroll down and the page looks broken

by hoppp

5/20/2026 at 1:22:24 AM

Would've been cooler if the emulator was implemented within the browser itself, lke DistroSea, or Archive.org.

by d3Xt3r

5/20/2026 at 1:43:40 AM

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.

by andreww591

5/20/2026 at 8:08:01 AM

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

by jxdxbx

5/19/2026 at 5:18:31 PM

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.

by TrackerFF

5/20/2026 at 2:01:55 PM

I absolutely LOVE your UI! And the content is fantastic as well.

by NoSalt

5/19/2026 at 8:19:03 PM

Searched, but could not find OS/9.

[edit] No, found it!

by HeyLaughingBoy

5/20/2026 at 1:56:31 AM

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.

by andreww591

5/19/2026 at 9:21:54 PM

Ran it on a 32k/64k Color Computer.

by rcakebread

5/21/2026 at 6:32:19 PM

So did I actually. Was also on an OS-9000 based project for a short while.

by HeyLaughingBoy

5/20/2026 at 10:20:19 PM

I learned a few things, from a Windows 10 user perspective

It definitely needs to be extracted to the C: drive to work

Also, make sure you update your copy of Oracle Virtualbox

Once it's working, change the input from PS-2 mouse to USB tablet (even if you have a mouse), otherwise your pointer goes invisible, but is still active.

I found TempleOS 5.03 in there, by the way.

I'm looking forward to playing with the various DEC PDP-11 and VAX/VMS options, reliving my days at Rose-Hulman and Purdue Calumet.

The HP-41 calculator is a nice touch!

by mikewarot

5/20/2026 at 9:43:57 AM

Awesome! No BeOS, or MSX?

by trumbitta2

5/19/2026 at 6:10:20 PM

THANK YOU!

This is a treasure trove. And glad you made the whole museum downloadable, so this treasure does not get lost.

by llsf

5/19/2026 at 8:03:27 PM

Not a single OS/2 screenshot..

by DrBurrito

5/19/2026 at 6:02:51 PM

VMS? I didn't see it listed.

by jschveibinz

5/20/2026 at 1:57:11 AM

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

by andreww591

5/19/2026 at 5:39:48 PM

I'd love to go back to the 90s and live it again.

by dchftcs

5/19/2026 at 5:50:46 PM

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.

by dfxm12

5/20/2026 at 12:37:27 AM

Very impressive! Thank you for doing this.

by mrandish

5/19/2026 at 5:34:40 PM

I don't see HAL or WOPR or Skynet or GLaDOS.

by delichon

5/20/2026 at 6:34:52 AM

The site has been HN-ed off!

by notorandit

5/19/2026 at 5:20:01 PM

Hug of death? Error code 522 on downloads.

by cf100clunk

5/19/2026 at 6:27:23 PM

Great work! please just offer dark mode

by kingleopold

5/20/2026 at 4:56:09 AM

I couldn't find Emacs?

by dosisking

5/20/2026 at 5:49:10 AM

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.

by ForOldHack

5/20/2026 at 3:47:53 PM

> It is not a spread sheet

org-tables would disagree.

by coldacid

5/19/2026 at 5:44:02 PM

quite impressive, how did you collected? just find images online or you actually have all of these OS.

by kramit1288

5/20/2026 at 1:02:28 AM

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).

by andreww591

5/20/2026 at 3:58:31 PM

interesting, traces goes back to 2006. thats cool :)

by kramit1288

5/19/2026 at 8:30:23 PM

I think something got into my eye.

by ike____________

5/20/2026 at 1:11:00 AM

No AIX?

by arberx

5/20/2026 at 1:50:05 AM

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.

by andreww591

5/20/2026 at 4:23:51 AM

I see Haiku but not BeOS

by jp_sc

5/19/2026 at 5:58:55 PM

TENEX and TOPS-20 would be nice

by tankenmate

5/20/2026 at 1:09:40 AM

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.

by andreww591

5/19/2026 at 6:14:29 PM

tops20 is avalible to use at sdf.org :)

by iberator

5/19/2026 at 7:08:21 PM

Where's Microsoft Bob?

by sagarp

5/19/2026 at 7:11:20 PM

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.“

by Someone

5/20/2026 at 10:24:51 PM

Oh, huh for some reason I thought it was a standalone OS

by sagarp

5/20/2026 at 6:57:19 AM

Love it. Thank you

by phwbikm

5/19/2026 at 11:29:41 PM

I don't see TempleOS here unfortunately https://gitlab.com/virtualosmuseum/virtualosmuseum/-/blob/ma...

by lorenzohess

5/20/2026 at 12:53:59 AM

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.

by andreww591

5/19/2026 at 10:31:41 PM

love this stuff. please change the color scheme asap

by 9p

5/19/2026 at 5:52:30 PM

I didn't see ryOS

by strrl

5/19/2026 at 9:01:45 PM

Reposting from iluvcommunism who's shadowbanned

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

by FergusArgyll

5/19/2026 at 9:08:21 PM

One can also click on their timestamp then click "vouch".

by jolmg

5/19/2026 at 9:45:49 PM

I did, I think it needs more than one vouch. Was still dead after I vouched anyway...

by FergusArgyll

5/20/2026 at 4:09:30 AM

I also could not find TempleOS, which obviously was the first thing i searched for - anyway great collection and page's look & feel. Thank you for creating & sharing.

by chr1ss_code

5/19/2026 at 4:10:17 PM

Is TempleOS in here?

by newer_vienna

5/19/2026 at 4:27:44 PM

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

by TheSkyHasEyes

5/19/2026 at 4:41:27 PM

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.

by ktm5j

5/19/2026 at 5:19:51 PM

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...

by newer_vienna

5/19/2026 at 7:53:28 PM

I knoow right?! Wonder how much bandwidth they user per month and how much it costs them.

by ktm5j

5/19/2026 at 5:18:55 PM

Or a search option. That would be nice.

by forinti

5/19/2026 at 6:58:42 PM

I ran to the comments with this question

by xstas1

5/19/2026 at 4:48:04 PM

Could not find it.

by f311a

5/19/2026 at 5:00:49 PM

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.

by ZebusJesus

5/19/2026 at 6:49:06 PM

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.

by leoxiv

5/20/2026 at 12:03:00 AM

Where is EMACS?

by ynac

5/20/2026 at 7:59:53 AM

This is an impressive effort and offering and I really want to try it out!

Clicking on "download" though, I get this:

> Full edition (121G zipped, 174G unzipped): From Internet Archive

Not to be picky about free stuff offered by others, but I'd be more happy to download a non-zipped torrent, ready for use, where I can contribute BW back to the project itself as a means of gratitude.

by josteink

5/20/2026 at 1:49:40 AM

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 ;-)

by tux

5/19/2026 at 8:23:27 PM

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.

by anthk

5/20/2026 at 1:59:13 AM

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.

by andreww591

5/19/2026 at 4:40:51 PM

This is awesome.

by theYipster

5/19/2026 at 4:50:09 PM

[dead]

by Alex_bith

5/20/2026 at 3:23:10 AM

[dead]

by animanoir

5/20/2026 at 7:35:32 AM

[dead]

by MrKoby07

5/19/2026 at 9:57:49 PM

[dead]

by ConanRus

5/19/2026 at 7:06:24 PM

[dead]

by noforkdone

5/19/2026 at 5:15:20 PM

This is great

by prettyjosn

5/20/2026 at 3:21:26 AM

That 'nearly' is important. I can think of one operating system that you cannot possibly have access to, because it was never published. (-:

by JdeBP