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

Posted by andreww591 13 hours ago

I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of(virtualosmuseum.org)

655 points | 152 commentspage 3

JdeBP 2 hours ago|

That 'nearly' is important. I can think of one operating system that you cannot possibly have access to, because it was never published. (-:

semireg 11 hours ago||

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

themadturk 8 hours ago|

Mine as well. Felt like I imagined a Mac felt like (I was Mac-envious in those days).

xbar 5 hours ago||

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.

protocolture 6 hours ago||

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.

d3Xt3r 4 hours ago||

Would've been cooler if the emulator was implemented within the browser itself, lke DistroSea, or Archive.org.

andreww591 3 hours ago|

I wish I could do that, but there are a lot of emulators that don't have web versions, and the launcher and related scripts are very heavily dependent on a Unix-like OS and there is no way to port them to JS (a completely separate launcher and scripts would have to be written).

It sucks that there's no good way to port Linux directly to WASM UML-style, since WASM insists on implementing memory safety at the bytecode level with no way to bypass it. There is a very limited port, but it doesn't support paging. Not all the emulators would run on a full-featured WASM port if one existed, but that could be dealt with by just using user-mode QEMU to run whichever ones are x86-only.

dansquizsoft 6 hours ago||

Oh man, this is absolutely amazing. I’ve built a much smaller project with 13 vintage OSes running in the browser, and even at this scale the amount of fiddly work involved was stupidly high. Doing this for 1700+ systems is crazy! Nice work.

Evidlo 11 hours ago||

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.

jzer0cool 10 hours ago||

For those experience with some of these OS, what might be something to explore (try) on these OS for some learning objective. Any call outs feature wise?

Postosuchus 8 hours ago||

Amazing project - and you actually fulfill a dream of mine (to have a collection absolutely all historically interesting UNIX-like OSes in VMs available on demand).

I'll dig through my collection of "abandoned" OS distros to see if I have something that could make an addition to your museum.

cortesoft 11 hours ago|

I just love passion projects like this. One person does a ton of work because they care about the thing, and then shares it with the world so everyone can enjoy it.

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