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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

#131

Post by andreww591 »

bilegeek wrote: post #63
eichin wrote: 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...

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

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

#132

Post by andreww591 »

simonh wrote: 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.

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

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

#133

Post by andreww591 »

edoceo wrote: post #118
andreww591 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

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

#135

Post by andreww591 »

MisterTea wrote: post #82
liquidise wrote: post #28

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.

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).

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

#136

Post by zzo38computer »

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.

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

#137

Post by mrandish »

liquidise wrote: post #28

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 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.

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

#139

Post by andreww591 »

nlitsme wrote: 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.

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)

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

#140

Post by andreww591 »

gwynforthewyn wrote: post #65
NikolaNovak wrote: post #61

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.

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.

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