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.
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.
I hadn't realized Domain/OS emulation was viable these days. It's one of the few systems that has actually "lost" features - the terminal-window-like thing (called pads, I think?) when in line mode had a dividing line at the bottom where your unconsumed typeahead was visible and you could continue to edit it until it got read - not just one line, the entire unconsumed input. (Not that it's a particularly desirable feature - it's just one that I'm pretty sure you can't implement with ptys...)
Unfortunately, pre-Domain/OS AEGIS is basically lost. One person popped up with talk of imaging their 9.6 floppies, but I haven't seen anything since then.
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?
Do you have that Windows 3.1 version that came with the Compaq that had the DE that was like a paper folder instead of an empty desktop, and that you could put the icons in the different tabs of the paper folder?
I had to Google and it does look like it, I remember the computer would boot into it and it also had space for a few (three?) icons outside the tabs (like in the “desktop”). It was a cool interface!
This triggered a rabbit hole search that had me rediscover Packard Bell Navigator[1]. The nostalgia and joy this page brings me is hard to describe. I hope everyone remembers their formative tech journey so fondly.
I never experienced it but somehow I still feel nostalgic for it. For all we've gained there's so much we've lost as well, I'm sad my kids won't grow up with anything like this.
Oh this is that this was called. A long time ago, like in Googles earlier stages, I tried so hard to find this from my memory, but I failed and over the years forgot about it. Thanks for bringing it up again.
I 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.
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.
I would suggest to crop your screenshots down to the OS being featured. It's a bit confusing to see a picture labeled as IBM AIX but then see GNOME 2 window decorations everywhere.
Pardon a simple question - this implies nested virtualization, or is the second step emulation?
The download is a Linux VM, gotcha.
Are other OS-s nested virtual machines inside that Linux VM, or emulators (in which case, holly mackerel, that is even more impressive :O... and also why??).
Readme seems to imply it's emulators, but it also uses the words "virtual/virtualization" or "VM images" liberally sprinkled.
I imagine the author's using OpenSIMH (https://opensimh.org) or something similar, so it'd be an emulated CPU running the userlands.
I have a container that runs a 4.3 BSD userland using opensimh; it's not super hard to set up, just takes a bit of patience and willingness to learn how opensimh works.
I 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.
“Microsoft Bob was a Microsoft software product intended to provide a more user-friendly interface for the Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows NT operating systems, supplanting the Windows Program Manager.“
Yeah 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
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.
That doesn't answer his question.. looks like there isn't a comprehensive list of what's actually included. Maybe for legal reasons but that's just a guess.
Maybe it falls under the "Various hobby/alternative OSes up to some very recent ones" category. I'm not going to download a one hundred gigabyte file to find out though...
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.
Some of these are runnable in the browser, for example here: https://copy.sh/v86/
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.
I hadn't realized Domain/OS emulation was viable these days. It's one of the few systems that has actually "lost" features - the terminal-window-like thing (called pads, I think?) when in line mode had a dividing line at the bottom where your unconsumed typeahead was visible and you could continue to edit it until it got read - not just one line, the entire unconsumed input. (Not that it's a particularly desirable feature - it's just one that I'm pretty sure you can't implement with ptys...)
Unfortunately, pre-Domain/OS AEGIS is basically lost. One person popped up with talk of imaging their 9.6 floppies, but I haven't seen anything since then.
[1]https://www.facebook.com/groups/retrocomputers/posts/7062462...
why could you not implement it as ptys.
Currently the terminal doesn't really process input itself, it just gives the program running the "raw" fd.
If instead the terminal gave the processes a pipe (for instance) and consumed all the pty input itself (and its end of the pipe being a buffer of that content), why wouldn't it be the same?
What an amazingly goofy (but also kinda maybe makes sense?) feature!
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.
Do you have that Windows 3.1 version that came with the Compaq that had the DE that was like a paper folder instead of an empty desktop, and that you could put the icons in the different tabs of the paper folder?
Your comment reminds me of HP's obscure EFI OS called QuickLook. I would guess there are a lot of obscure OSs out there.
I'd watch this if I were you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssob-7sGVWs
Oh, yeah! I think ASUS also had something like that at some point.
I believe you are speaking of Tabworks?
I had to Google and it does look like it, I remember the computer would boot into it and it also had space for a few (three?) icons outside the tabs (like in the “desktop”). It was a cool interface!
I don't think I've heard of an alternate shell/launcher like that before. Do you remember what it was called?
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
Linux sucks differently every time a kernel is released.
> NextStep sucks, but it's pretty.
macOS sucks, but it's pretty
This triggered a rabbit hole search that had me rediscover Packard Bell Navigator[1]. The nostalgia and joy this page brings me is hard to describe. I hope everyone remembers their formative tech journey so fondly.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Bell_Navigator
I 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.
The maturity brought upon us homogenized experience. 90's user interfaces were something else, man.
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.
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!
Is there a way to see a list of the operating systems included without having to download and run the tool?
I hope so, and also that it is a plain black-and-white list.
I can't figure out how to find a list and I believe that's intentional to avoid simplistic copyright search and takedown type of problems. It is aggravating how little information is available on the website.
1) I run my own systems in emulation and its always educational to see how other people handle configuration and sysadmin type problems. Much like programmers reading other programmer's code for educational purposes.
2) I have a genuine philosophical question which it appears I cannot answer by any means simpler than running it and trying it. Similar to the halting problem LOL. I wonder how the project handles operating systems like MVS/360 where there exists a perfectly good 1960s installation (which I have installed by hand from tape for the experience) however no one uses that IRL because the various MVS Turnkey projects provide seemingly infinite debugged and dependency organized patch sets. There's quite a difference between trying to white knuckle a homemade bare basic MVS/360 from the 1960s vs "MVS Turnkey 4" which basically just works out of the box.
Another example of #2 above is there's DEC PDP-8 OS-8 which technically boots... but the most common distro had a non-working but trivially fixable FORTRAN compiler (IIRC the runtime package filename was wrong or something similar). There's a lot of fun customization.
Another example of #2 above is I wonder how the author handles RSX-11M, distribute the ancient unpatched unmodified OS from DEC or ship something like the Billquist distro, or does the author ship the PiDP-11 RSX-11M (or is PiDP-11 shipping the Billquist RSX-11 distro now?)
I guess for people not into retrocomputing it would be like claiming some rando RedHat .iso from the 90s is "The" Linux operating system. Well, its "a" linux from one instant in time... Likewise there seems to be no "The" MVS/360 operating system there's a zillion possible local installs of all capability levels and eras, all very different and fun.
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.
My first operating system and GUI was GEOS on the Commodore 64. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
I would suggest to crop your screenshots down to the OS being featured. It's a bit confusing to see a picture labeled as IBM AIX but then see GNOME 2 window decorations everywhere.
Pardon a simple question - this implies nested virtualization, or is the second step emulation?
The download is a Linux VM, gotcha.
Are other OS-s nested virtual machines inside that Linux VM, or emulators (in which case, holly mackerel, that is even more impressive :O... and also why??).
Readme seems to imply it's emulators, but it also uses the words "virtual/virtualization" or "VM images" liberally sprinkled.
I imagine the author's using OpenSIMH (https://opensimh.org) or something similar, so it'd be an emulated CPU running the userlands.
I have a container that runs a 4.3 BSD userland using opensimh; it's not super hard to set up, just takes a bit of patience and willingness to learn how opensimh works.
I 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.
Where's Microsoft Bob?
That wasn’t an operating system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob:
“Microsoft Bob was a Microsoft software product intended to provide a more user-friendly interface for the Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows NT operating systems, supplanting the Windows Program Manager.“
Also might be of interest: http://www.typewritten.org/
Nice! They have HP's NewWave (which I was always fond of)
Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104428
The rarest possible choice for Amiga (Amiga UNIX) represented. Curious thing to do. Fun project site either way.
Could really do with a torrent. 120GB at 3MB/sec...
If my download ever finishes i'll spin up a torrent.
So far on retry #7, 46/120GB done
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
THANK YOU!
This is a treasure trove. And glad you made the whole museum downloadable, so this treasure does not get lost.
This is wonderful. I'm looking forward to looking thru it properly. My earliest "real computer" memories are VAX/VMS and SunTools...
I don't see HAL or WOPR or Skynet or GLaDOS.
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.
Great work! please just offer dark mode
I'd love to go back to the 90s and live it again.
A Mister does a good job of recreating period appropriate load times and quirks. You can put it in whatever old computer case you're most nostalgic for, connect an old CRT monitor and most peripherals should have some USB converter if necessary.
Scrolling is extremely laggy.
VMS? I didn't see it listed.
TENEX and TOPS-20 would be nice
tops20 is avalible to use at sdf.org :)
quite impressive, how did you collected? just find images online or you actually have all of these OS.
Hug of death? Error code 522 on downloads.
I didn't see ryOS
Blog post: https://andreww591.blogspot.com/2026/05/ive-released-virtual...
Wow. That was a bit of nostalgia, just to read some of the names.
Yeah! Browsing through the screenshots truly feels like watching vintage porn.
You can only view the operating system, you can't view those websites again, haha.
Is TempleOS in here?
I ran to the comments with this question
Here you go: https://github.com/andarazoroflove/VMs/releases/download/1.0...
https://virtualosmuseum.org/readme/#whats-included
That doesn't answer his question.. looks like there isn't a comprehensive list of what's actually included. Maybe for legal reasons but that's just a guess.
Maybe it falls under the "Various hobby/alternative OSes up to some very recent ones" category. I'm not going to download a one hundred gigabyte file to find out though...
Or a search option. That would be nice.
Could not find it.
Blasphemy, all shall know the power of Holy-C! Sad that he struggled in life like he did and the way it ended, he was a brilliant programmer.
It's still good that his memory lives on though. Even in communities where technology isn't the focus I still see mentions of him from time to time.
Very neat to see this project come to completion Andreww.
Are there any any operating systems that you'd like to add to the collection but haven't been able to find?
Maybe someone here at HN could help with that.
This is awesome.
This is great