Live data from Hacker News

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

virtualosmuseum.org

121–130 of 236 posts

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

#122
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.

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

#123

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/resume #12, 97.3/120GB done (i am live updating this comment as long as i can)

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 :)

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

#124
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#16, 115/120GB and it is not resuming ... 2026-05-19 16:23:03 ERROR 522: . #23, 118.5/120GB and going again

in for a torrent/magnet link as well

posted above.

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

#126
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.

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

#127
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.

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

#128

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.

https://www.lysator.liu.se/hackdict/split/avatar.html

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

#129
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.

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

#130
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…

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.
Post reply on HN