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.

FYI, 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.

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.

Some I would love to see:

- Convergent Technologies CTOS

- Whatever the Rational R1000 ran (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)

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...)

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.

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?

How can I speak with the heavens if you don't have temple OS.

Is there a way to see a list of the operating systems included without having to download and run the tool?

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

My first operating system and GUI was GEOS on the Commodore 64. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)

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.

It would be great if there was a list of OSes in the collection.

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

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.

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.

Sorry 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.

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!

I 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!

The rarest possible choice for Amiga (Amiga UNIX) represented. Curious thing to do. Fun project site either way.

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.

Nice. 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/

Fantastic 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

Also might be of interest: http://www.typewritten.org/

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.

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, 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.

Not only can you implement that with PTYs, it's how they operate by default. That's why you can telnet to an HTTP server and make a mistake and use backspace to fix it. The terminal will only send lines over. You have to use a command to put it into "raw" mode so the application gets every keystroke immediately. You have to ask for your PTY to not work that way.

What an amazingly goofy (but also kinda maybe makes sense?) feature!

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?

It took me a few minutes to determine that this is basically software that one can download, not a website that showcases screenshots from all those OSes. A search feature would be great, or even just a text list of all included OSes.

I'm also wondering whether/how they include OSes from devices that VICE already emulates, since that could save some work if they want to include OSes of Commodore devices.

+1 for this feature. And being able to download specific OSes instead of the entire 121GB zip file.

I hope so, and also that it is a plain black-and-white list.

https://ia601001.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/18...'

You are basically expanding the zip file, and you can pick and choose.

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.

> Packard Bell Navigator is an alternative shell for the Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 operating systems

Huh. I thought the term "shell" generally referred to command line interfaces to the OS and that Unity's way of describing itself as a graphical shell was some "new" (2011) generalization of the term, but I guess there is at least this precedent for using the word like that.

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 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.

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.

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)

> 2.x ran on the 80286 in protected mode, the only OS I know which did that.

SCO Xenix.

Concurrent DOS/286.

DR FlexOS.

OS/2 1.x.

Coherent 2 (IIRC).

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.

> 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.