Hacker News: andreww591

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:59:13 +0000

Helios unfortunately isn't yet included. Last time I checked the Transputer emulator doesn't support the special Helios I/O server protocol, which is different from the one that the usual occam software used. It's on my long list of emulators/OSes to fix/finish though.

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:57:11 +0000

Several older versions of VMS are included, with the latest being 7.3 for Alpha.

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:56:31 +0000

Multiple versions and variants of OS-9 are included. There are images for NitrOS-9 on CoCo and Dragon, several ports of OS-9/6809, OS-9/68K 2.4 for X68000, and OS-9000/x86 6.1.

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:50:05 +0000

PC/IX 1.0, AIX PS/2 1.3, and AIX/6000 4.3.3 are included; I just didn't post any screenshots of them.

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:43:40 +0000

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.

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:40:54 +0000

I haven't yet included a full list, but I guess I could include one.

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.

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:12:22 +0000

Yeah, they're very common. Some emulators like QEMU and MAME have many different versions included in order to deal with regressions.

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:09:40 +0000

TOPS-20 4.1 and 7.1 are both included.

I'm not aware of any fully working TENEX images unfortunately. There are partial images, but last time I checked they weren't in a state that was even remotely usable.

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:02:28 +0000

The vast majority were downloaded. A few I got when I exchanged compilation DVDs with someone in Finland in 2006 and 2009 (I uploaded the images on those to BetaArchive back then and they've made their way onto various other sites). The only ones that I have that were installed from images I dumped from original media that hadn't been previously shared were LynxOS 4.0 and MaxOS Linux (not to be confused with macOS, it was an obscure early-2000s commercial Slackware fork from a company that was semi-local to me; the CD was given to me back then by somebody at a long-defunct local computer store).

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:53:59 +0000

The last version of TempleOS is included, but I installed it myself, and I didn't bother to include most of the images that I just installed by myself in the credits.

I'm also planning to add earlier versions as well as the later forks at some point.

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:50:00 +0000

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.

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:39:02 +0000

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)

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:15:47 +0000

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).

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:02:51 +0000

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

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:02:16 +0000

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

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:06 +0000

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

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Tue, 19 May 2026 23:59:33 +0000

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.

New comment by andreww591 in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

andreww591 — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:14:11 +0000

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

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

andreww591 — Tue, 19 May 2026 15:53:38 +0000

Article URL: https://virtualosmuseum.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48195009

Points: 671

# Comments: 153

New comment by andreww591 in "John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta"

andreww591 — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 01:03:12 +0000

At least for certain types of OSes, it should be relatively easy to get most of Linux's hardware support by porting LKL (https://github.com/lkl/linux) and adding appropriate hooks to access hardware.

Of course, your custom kernel will still have to have some of its own code to support core platform/chipset devices, but LKL should pretty much cover just about all I/O devices (and you also get stuff like disk filesystems and a network stack along with the device drivers).

Also, it probably wouldn't work so well for typical monolithic kernels, but it should work decently on something that has user-mode driver support.