Posted by andreww591 12 hours ago
This preservation of old OS is important.
Spread the word, this needs to reach anyone who's interested in it.
macOS sucks, but it's pretty
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.
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)
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.
I think they were usually developed in C. Metrowerks had a compiler that could build them, and Open Watcom can still do so as well.
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.
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.
All of those OSes you mentioned are included. BTRON isn't a single OS, but a small family of OSes based on a common specification (just like Unix is); the OS museum includes the demo 1B/V3 and Chokanji 4. The FOSS BTRON implementation you're thinking of is almost certainly B-free/EOTA, which is also included. EOTA never actually implemented BTRON proper before it got abandoned. It basically just ended up being like a Unix based on an ITRON kernel.
Documentation for some OSes is included, although I've focused more on user/administrator documentation over developer documentation. It would probably be a good idea to include developer documentation though.
I've thought about making individual images available for download, but many of them are dependent on particular emulator versions and/or the common launch scripts so it isn't quite that simple.