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.

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.

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...)

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.

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

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.

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

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

Not a single OS/2 screenshot..

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!

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?

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.

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

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.

Some of these are runnable in the browser, for example here: https://copy.sh/v86/

Pardon a simple question - this implies nested virtualization, or is the second step emulation?

The download is a Linux VM, gotcha.

Are other OS-s nested virtual machines inside that Linux VM, or emulators (in which case, holly mackerel, that is even more impressive :O... and also why??).

Readme seems to imply it's emulators, but it also uses the words "virtual/virtualization" or "VM images" liberally sprinkled.

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

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.

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

Could really do with a torrent. 120GB at 3MB/sec...

This is wonderful. I'm looking forward to looking thru it properly. My earliest "real computer" memories are VAX/VMS and SunTools...

THANK YOU!

This is a treasure trove. And glad you made the whole museum downloadable, so this treasure does not get lost.

I don't see HAL or WOPR or Skynet or GLaDOS.

Just a couple of years ago I worked for a client who had a computer with Solaris 2.x running. It was quite a critical piece in the system.

VMS? I didn't see it listed.

Where's Microsoft Bob?

Great work! please just offer dark mode

I'd love to go back to the 90s and live it again.

Scrolling is extremely laggy.

quite impressive, how did you collected? just find images online or you actually have all of these OS.

TENEX and TOPS-20 would be nice

Hug of death? Error code 522 on downloads.

I didn't see ryOS

Blog post: https://andreww591.blogspot.com/2026/05/ive-released-virtual...

Wow. That was a bit of nostalgia, just to read some of the names.

Is TempleOS in here?

Very neat to see this project come to completion Andreww.

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.

This is awesome.

This is great