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?
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...)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I should probably add screenshots of earlier versions of those (or in the case of Domain/OS, screenshots of dm).
Rather than just another name for Domain/OS, Domain/IX was actually a Unix compatibility layer that was an add-on product for pre-SR10 AEGIS versions, with SR10 merging it into the base OS (pre-SR10 had no built-in Unix compatibility).
AFAIK even though it's usually associated more with HP-UX, VUE actually originated at Apollo before HP bought them, although I'm not sure if they ever actually released it before the acquisition.
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).
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.
115 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 94.2 ms ] threadYou are basically expanding the zip file, and you can pick and choose.
Are there any any operating systems that you'd like to add to the collection but haven't been able to find?
Maybe someone here at HN could help with that.
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)
SCO Xenix.
Concurrent DOS/286.
DR FlexOS.
OS/2 1.x.
Coherent 2 (IIRC).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Bell_Navigator
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.
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.
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.
Rather than just another name for Domain/OS, Domain/IX was actually a Unix compatibility layer that was an add-on product for pre-SR10 AEGIS versions, with SR10 merging it into the base OS (pre-SR10 had no built-in Unix compatibility).
AFAIK even though it's usually associated more with HP-UX, VUE actually originated at Apollo before HP bought them, although I'm not sure if they ever actually released it before the acquisition.