10 ms·
I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of
- HeyLaughingBoy 5mo agoSearched, but could not find OS/9. [edit] No, found it!
- rcakebread 5mo agoRan it on a 32k/64k Color Computer.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5mo agoSo did I actually. Was also on an OS-9000 based project for a short while.
- andreww591 5mo agoMultiple 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.
- theYipster 5mo agoThis is awesome.
- a1o 5mo agoDo 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?
- andreww591 5mo agoI don't think I've heard of an alternate shell/launcher like that before. Do you remember what it was called?
- edoceo 5mo agoWindows still (well, Win2000) lets you build a custom shell, just replace explorer.exe (and a bunch of other work).
- andreww591 5mo agoI've heard of custom shells for Windows before, but not that specific one
- ForOldHack 5mo agoHSc made an alternate file manager for Windows 2. They never ported it to Windows 3.
- Avamander 5mo agoYour comment reminds me of HP's obscure EFI OS called QuickLook. I would guess there are a lot of obscure OSs out there.
- a1o 5mo agoOh, yeah! I think ASUS also had something like that at some point.
- lproven 5mo agoThere were multiple ones, including some by BIOS vendors offered to many hardware OEMs. Hyperspace was one of the most widely-seen. https://gekk.info/articles/hyperspace.htm https://gekk.info/articles/hyperspace.htm
- philistine 5mo agoI'd watch this if I were you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssob-7sGVWs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssob-7sGVWs
- Elfener 5mo agoI 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=PLec1d3OBbZ8IBeFODHXLy0m0okuZhqJnT https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLec1d3OBbZ8IBeFODHXLy...
- philistine 5mo ago> I knew what video that was going to be before I clicked it. A man of culture.
- lproven 5mo agoText article, instead of video, for other video-haters like me... https://gekk.info/articles/hp-quickweb.htm https://gekk.info/articles/hp-quickweb.htm
- simianpirate 5mo agoI believe you are speaking of Tabworks?
- a1o 5mo agoI 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!
- xhrpost 5mo agoThat 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.
- lproven 5mo agoHP had several innovative GUIs of its own, before Microsoft destroyed the market with a good enough one of its own. NewWave was its first and long predated even Windows 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewWave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewWave HP was once a UI and GUI pioneer and did other quite radical stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_User_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_User_Environment TabWorks wasn't an HP thing -- it just bundled it with some consumer Compaq kit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TabWorks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TabWorks
- AnimalMuppet 5mo agoWow. That was a bit of nostalgia, just to read some of the names.
- newer_vienna 5mo agoIs TempleOS in here?
- TheSkyHasEyes 5mo agohttps://virtualosmuseum.org/readme/#whats-included https://virtualosmuseum.org/readme/#whats-included
- ktm5j 5mo agoThat 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.
- forinti 5mo agoOr a search option. That would be nice.
- newer_vienna 5mo agoMaybe 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...
- ktm5j 5mo agoI knoow right?! Wonder how much bandwidth they user per month and how much it costs them.
- f311a 5mo agoCould not find it.
- ZebusJesus 5mo agoBlasphemy, 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.
- pfcd 5mo agoAlso might be of interest: http://www.typewritten.org/ http://www.typewritten.org/
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoRecent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104428
- WillAdams 5mo agoNice! They have HP's NewWave (which I was always fond of)
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoBlog post: https://andreww591.blogspot.com/2026/05/ive-released-virtual-museum-with-nearly.html https://andreww591.blogspot.com/2026/05/ive-released-virtual...
- SkiFire13 5mo agoIs there a way to see a list of the operating systems included without having to download and run the tool?
- cf100clunk 5mo agoI hope so, and also that it is a plain black-and-white list.
- VLM 5mo agoI 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.
- eichin 5mo agoI 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...)
- glhaynes 5mo agoWhat an amazingly goofy (but also kinda maybe makes sense?) feature!
- compsciphd 5mo agowhy 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?
- eichin 5mo agopipes 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...)
- bilegeek 5mo agoUnfortunately, 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/7062462807116873/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/retrocomputers/posts/7062462...
- neilv 5mo agoI 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?
- Teever 5mo agoVery 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.
- sdbillin 5mo agoCould really do with a torrent. 120GB at 3MB/sec...
- Teever 5mo agoYeah 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
- dmitrygr 5mo agoIf 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)
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Alex_bith 5mo ago[dead]
- nlitsme 5mo agoquite 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.
- MisterTea 5mo ago> 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.
- whartung 5mo agoMind, 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.
- davidgnz 5mo agoI 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.
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- liquidise 5mo agoThis 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Bell_Navigator
- quietfox 5mo agoOh 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.
- AlecSchueler 5mo agoI 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.
- Keyframe 5mo agoThe maturity brought upon us homogenized experience. 90's user interfaces were something else, man.
- hulitu 5mo ago> 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.
- Keyframe 5mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation
- CalRobert 5mo ago
- prettyjosn 5mo agoThis is great
- TrackerFF 5mo agoJust 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.
- cf100clunk 5mo agoHug of death? Error code 522 on downloads.
- neilv 5mo agoImpressive 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.
- andreww591 5mo agoYeah, 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.
- delichon 5mo agoI don't see HAL or WOPR or Skynet or GLaDOS.
- dchftcs 5mo agoI'd love to go back to the 90s and live it again.
- dfxm12 5mo agoA 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.
- kramit1288 5mo agoquite impressive, how did you collected? just find images online or you actually have all of these OS.
- andreww591 5mo agoThe 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).
- kramit1288 5mo agointeresting, traces goes back to 2006. thats cool :)
- erickhill 5mo agoThe rarest possible choice for Amiga (Amiga UNIX) represented. Curious thing to do. Fun project site either way.
- strrl 5mo agoI didn't see ryOS
- iluvcommunism 5mo agohttps://os.ryo.lu/ https://os.ryo.lu/ Quite cool.
- FergusArgyll 5mo agoReposting from iluvcommunism who's shadowbanned https://os.ryo.lu/ Quite cool.
- jolmg 5mo agoOne can also click on their timestamp then click "vouch".
- FergusArgyll 5mo agoI did, I think it needs more than one vouch. Was still dead after I vouched anyway...
- cortesoft 5mo agoI 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.
- tankenmate 5mo agoTENEX and TOPS-20 would be nice
- iberator 5mo agotops20 is avalible to use at sdf.org :)
- andreww591 5mo agoTOPS-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.
- StayTrue 5mo agoReminds me of the alt.sysadmin.recovery canonical list of operating systems that suck. https://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/humor/Unix/os-suck.html https://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/humor/Unix/os-suck.html
- yard2010 5mo ago> NextStep sucks, but it's pretty. macOS sucks, but it's pretty
- ForOldHack 5mo agoIts called Eye candy, cheap plastic eye candy, but it sucks.
- cozyman 5mo ago[dead]
- bkircher 5mo agoLinux sucks differently every time a kernel is released.
- bitwize 5mo agoAh yes, Scary Devil Monastery (which also sounds like it'd make a pretty sweet Doom map).
- jschveibinz 5mo agoVMS? I didn't see it listed.
- andreww591 5mo agoSeveral older versions of VMS are included, with the latest being 7.3 for Alpha.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- nonamenoslogan 5mo agoThis 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!
- drittich 5mo agoAnd I thought I was killing it just saving some install disk images!
- llsf 5mo agoTHANK YOU! This is a treasure trove. And glad you made the whole museum downloadable, so this treasure does not get lost.
- Narishma 5mo agoScrolling is extremely laggy.
- theandrewbailey 5mo agoThe laggy scrolling and glowy visual design make me think that this site was vibe-coded. Badly.
- semireg 5mo agoMy first operating system and GUI was GEOS on the Commodore 64. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
- themadturk 5mo agoMine as well. Felt like I imagined a Mac felt like (I was Mac-envious in those days).
- liotier 5mo agoIs PC/GEOS (GeoWorks Ensemble) in there ? Or does it count as a DOS application ?
- Evidlo 5mo agoI 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.
- kingleopold 5mo agoGreat work! please just offer dark mode
- NikolaNovak 5mo agoPardon 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.
- gwynforthewyn 5mo agoI imagine the author's using OpenSIMH (https://opensimh.org 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.
- andreww591 5mo agoSeveral 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.
- NikolaNovak 5mo agoThx! You got a new, albeit small scale, patreon - this is awesome :)
- rogster 5mo agoThis is wonderful. I'm looking forward to looking thru it properly. My earliest "real computer" memories are VAX/VMS and SunTools...
- whartung 5mo agoI 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. :)
- justmarc 5mo agoAn 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.
- ForOldHack 5mo agoSince there is a multitlude of whatabout... Oberon?
- pjmlp 5mo agoMore specially all variants. Oberon, Oberon System 3, Oberon-2, Active Oberon (AOS/BlueBottle), Component Pascal, Zonnon, Oberon-07
- simonh 5mo agoNo Pick? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system My first actual job was working for a local health authority here in the UK, and they had a Pick computer running some database application thing, I think to do with accounting. I had to run the backups. Sorry to be a whinger, I don't mean to belittle the monumental amount of work.
- CalRobert 5mo agoWhat a legendary name for the developer.
- smnplk 5mo agoOmg, I am dead. Dick Pick. That is the best name, not just for a developer :D
- dotancohen 5mo agoJust 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.
- dnnddidiej 5mo agoBet he wishes his surname was Bastard. Rich Bastard.
- dotancohen 5mo agoThat's great! He is a friend of a friend of my mother, I'll suggest that she call him that!
- bkummel 5mo agoDick is a normal, be it old-fashioned, first name in The Netherlands.
- noforkdone 5mo ago[dead]
- sagarp 5mo agoWhere's Microsoft Bob?
- Someone 5mo agoThat wasn’t an operating system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob 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.“
- sagarp 5mo agoOh, huh for some reason I thought it was a standalone OS
- salted-cacao 5mo agoSome of these are runnable in the browser, for example here: https://copy.sh/v86/ https://copy.sh/v86/
- jzer0cool 5mo agoFor 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?
- hulitu 5mo agoA 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.
- wattzee 5mo agoHow can I speak with the heavens if you don't have temple OS.
- juris 5mo agoexactly this. no throne is more fit for Claude!
- DrBurrito 5mo agoNot a single OS/2 screenshot..
- anthk 5mo agoHeliOS 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 https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv4n4/transputer.html They were pretty much ahead of time with multiprocessing.
- andreww591 5mo agoHelios 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.
- anthk 5mo agoThere's some transputer emulator/OS from Biyubi/the Toledo family (the Nanochess guy): https://github.com/nanochess/transputer https://github.com/nanochess/transputer First article in the series: https://nanochess.org/pascal.html https://nanochess.org/pascal.html
- ike____________ 5mo agoI think something got into my eye.
- danborn26 5mo agoThis 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.
- andreww591 5mo agoYeah, they're very common. Some emulators like QEMU and MAME have many different versions included in order to deal with regressions.
- drewg123 5mo agoIt would be great if there was a list of OSes in the collection.
- Postosuchus 5mo agoAmazing 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.
- ConanRus 5mo ago[dead]
- eduo 5mo agoNice. 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/ https://aresluna.org/frame-of-preference/
- 9p 5mo agolove this stuff. please change the color scheme asap
- dansquizsoft 5mo agoOh 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.
- pvelagal 5mo agoI loved those solaris machines in our department lab!
- lorenzohess 5mo agoI don't see TempleOS here unfortunately https://gitlab.com/virtualosmuseum/virtualosmuseum/-/blob/master/CREDITS.md https://gitlab.com/virtualosmuseum/virtualosmuseum/-/blob/ma...
- andreww591 5mo agoThe 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.
- protocolture 5mo agoWish 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.
- xbar 5mo agoFantastic. 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.
- INTPenis 5mo agoWhile 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.
- xiii1408 5mo agohttps://www.lysator.liu.se/hackdict/split/avatar.html https://www.lysator.liu.se/hackdict/split/avatar.html
- jonnyasmar 5mo agoWhat 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.
- bitwize 5mo agoI 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.
- rbanffy 5mo ago> 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...
- spijdar 5mo agoThis 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 https://www.netbsd.org/ports/sparc/faq.html#voyager-mouse
- ynac 5mo agoWhere is EMACS?
- zzo38computer 5mo agoIs 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.
- andreww591 5mo agoI 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.
- ForOldHack 5mo agoThe abstract list, which is pretty complete is here: https://virtualosmuseum.org/readme/#whats-included https://virtualosmuseum.org/readme/#whats-included
- mrandish 5mo agoVery impressive! Thank you for doing this.
- arberx 5mo agoNo AIX?
- andreww591 5mo agoPC/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.
- d3Xt3r 5mo agoWould've been cooler if the emulator was implemented within the browser itself, lke DistroSea, or Archive.org.
- andreww591 5mo agoI 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.
- jxdxbx 5mo agoI want the opposite: something like https://infinitemac.org/ https://infinitemac.org/ but 100% downloaded and local.
- tux 5mo agoNow 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 ;-)
- JdeBP 5mo agoThat 'nearly' is important. I can think of one operating system that you cannot possibly have access to, because it was never published. (-:
- animanoir 5mo ago[dead]
- chr1ss_code 5mo agoI 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.
- jp_sc 5mo agoI see Haiku but not BeOS
- dosisking 5mo agoI couldn't find Emacs?
- ForOldHack 5mo agoAlthough 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.
- anthk 5mo agoit's a SpreadSheet by default, and from old times: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/ses.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/ses.html Also: https://howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/spreadsheet.html https://howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/spreadsheet.html
- coldacid 5mo ago> It is not a spread sheet org-tables would disagree.
- notorandit 5mo agoThe site has been HN-ed off!
- phwbikm 5mo agoLove it. Thank you
- MrKoby07 5mo ago[dead]
- josteink 5mo agoThis 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.
- trumbitta2 5mo agoAwesome! No BeOS, or MSX?
- qalmakka 5mo agoFantastic 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
- andreww591 5mo agoSorry 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.
- rbanffy 5mo agoSome I would love to see: - Convergent Technologies CTOS - Whatever the Rational R1000 ran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_R1000 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)
- teh_klev 5mo agoAs 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.
- andreww591 5mo agoDG/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.
- NoSalt 5mo agoI absolutely LOVE your UI! And the content is fantastic as well.
- hoppp 5mo agoLooks weird on mobile. I scroll down and the page looks broken
- mikewarot 5mo agoI 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!
- Mallory_Ringess 5mo agoFYI, 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.
- davsti4 5mo agoYou 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.
- facingtheages 5mo agoThis is quite good and I really like it.
- mcunninghamhn 4mo agoHonestly it looks like it's probably a wonderful project but it really hurts my eyes to read with the website style. I don't mean "it's so bad it hurts my eyes" but literally the colours/contrast make it quite intense and straining to look at and read through. Might be great to add a more plain/non fancy UI mode on the website viewers can switch to. I've got a much more readable version by just disabling these 2 CSS elements and saving it as an override as a quick fix for myself root{ --vw-grid: rgba(255, 43, 214, .55); } and body{ background: linear-gradient(180deg, var(--vw-sun-top) 0%, var(--vw-sun-mid) 50%, var(--vw-sun-bot) 100%); }