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

virtualosmuseum.org

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

#82

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

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.

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

#83

This is stellar. I've been doing this for a few years myself, but I thought I was killing it with like 70ish OSs. Thank you for all your work!

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

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

#84
post #66

No Pick? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system My first actual job was working for a local health authority here in the UK, and they had a Pick computer running some database application thing, I think to do with accounting. I had to run the backups. Sorry to be a whinger, I don't mean to belittle the monumental amount of work.

What a legendary name for the developer.

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

#85
post #23

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.

> 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.

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

#87

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.

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.

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

#88
post #16

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 fe…

Unfortunately, pre-Domain/OS AEGIS is basically lost. One person popped up with talk of imaging their 9.6 floppies, but I haven't seen anything since then. [1] https://www.facebook.com/groups/retrocomputers/posts/7062462...

I 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?

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

#89
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't answer his question.. looks like there isn't a comprehensive list of what's actually included. Maybe for legal reasons but that's just a guess.

Maybe it falls under the "Various hobby/alternative OSes up to some very recent ones" category. I'm not going to download a one hundred gigabyte file to find out though...

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

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

#90
post #23

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.

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.

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