WinWorld: online museum of vintage, abandoned, and pre-release software | Hacker News Reader

WinWorld: online museum of vintage, abandoned, and pre-release software

winworldpc.com

I didn't see it on there; it's missing Monkey Linux, which was the first Linux I installed, on a 386 "laptop" (Compaq SLT/386) with 6 MB of RAM.

Why 6 MB? Well, I bought it used without a battery, so I built one out of old NiCd cells from used cell phone batteries; this monster of electrical tape, hot glue, and hope did not fit into the spot meant for it, so with some creative dremeling and removal of a stick of RAM, I got it to "fit".

Monkey Linux was unique in one special way - it ran on top of the DOS filesystem, IIRC, in it's own partition. I think at the time I had Caldera's OpenDOS installed (speaking of which - it's not on the site, either). You could easily copy files back and forth from Monkey to MS-DOS. I never looked at it too deeply, but I bet everything was perm'd 777 root access, too - or something close.

I quickly moved on from Monkey to Turbo Linux 2.0 - but it served me well to learn a bit on (more like freshen up what I had known already from using AIX at a former employer).

Here's some links to Monkey:

http://projectdevolve.tripod.com/index.htm

http://www.ipt.ntnu.no/~knutb/linux486/download/monkey/

I don't know if you can get a complete download between those two links or not, but if WinWorld wants a full copy, they can contact me and I can send it to them.

Same for Caldera OpenDOS. I'm not sure what the last version of it I have of it, though.

> Monkey Linux was unique in one special way - it ran on top of the DOS filesystem, IIRC, in it's own partition.

Not unique at all; Slackware was installable to a UMSDOS partition in the same way back in the mid nineties. That's how a lot of us got started since you could get your feet wet without destroying your DOS/Windows partition.

The performance was abysmal though, and this was apparent as soon as you got brave enough to partition your hard drive (or add a secondary drive) to install to ext2 native.

I used Pygmy Linux which was similar -- it installed in a subdirectory of an existing DOS install and booted with LOADLIN. It was quite useful -- for example it was a simple effective way to probe IDE disk types and parameters, far easier than using multiple DOS utilities and cross-referencing.

DR-DOS is still around and I have been working on getting some updates working. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/58013.html

Any idea what the copyright situation is on these downloads?

The page for Windows XP (Whistler) shows this message:

> Microsoft has asserted their copyright status regarding Windows XP. WinWorld respects this and therefore will not host Windows XP.

> Microsoft still supports various incarnations of this software, and its availability competes with newer Windows product sales. Windows XP is not rare or in danger of disappearing, and therefore has no real place on WinWorld anyway.

However, the pre-release versions are available for download?!

Presumably the betas and pre-release versions are dead-ends. You can't patch a pre-release copy of XP to Service Pack 3

Abandonware is definitely in a grey area when it comes to copyright.

In our experience, most companies (at least the ones that are still around) don't mind the distribution of outdated and unsupport products provided no profit is being gained from said distribution.

Microsoft, and likely other software companies, are at least vaguely aware of our existence. We received a DMCA notice from them approximately five years ago, regarding the RTM versions of Windows XP and Office 2000. Since those were removed we haven't had an issue.

Given you aren't going to see people using Whistler in production use, they didn't seem to bother with requesting any pre-release software be removed.

The short version is, I consider it both safe and ethical to use any software on WinWorld for experimental, personal and educational purposes. I only advise caution if you're considering use in a place of business; proper licensing is of course important in that situation.

- Duff (Founder, WW)

For the sake of argument, let's say someone had to run Windows 95 or 98 at a business, to support an old piece of equipment with an expansion card and drivers can't run on newer software. Is it even possible to pay for a license for these old versions of Windows?

> Is it even possible to pay for a license for these old versions of Windows?

Not from MS - they don't sell or support it any longer. But, you can easily find real install CDs with actual licenses on the used market. Check Ebay and thrift stores, sometimes used book stores, too. I've also found a healthy offering of old OS install software at hamfest swap meets (where if you're lucky, you'll also find for sale - and relatively cheap - older computers, such as S-100 bus machines from the 1970s).

That's the only way you'll be able to get a "legal" version of the operating system.

I once had access to one of their subscriptions for startups, were you haves, among other things, access to their software, and they have old releases on their directory you can download, as Windows 3.11 and the like. I don't know how is the licensing for that (only while you hold subscription to the site?).

Hey Duff, there's a couple of missing operating systems I noted here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22099717

Monkey Linux and Caldera OpenDOS; I gave some links for the former, I think there are sources out there of the latter. If you want or need anything not there, let me know, I probably have it in my archives at home.

IIRC OpenDOS was a rebrand of Novell DOS, which was a rebrand of DR-DOS, which has a page: https://winworldpc.com/product/dr-dos/7x

I'm not judging what you're doing, but from a copyright law perspective it's not a grey area. It's copyright infringement if you haven't been granted a license to distribute the software. Companies may not complain but that doesn't stop it from being copyright infringement.

WinWorld has been particularly useful to me this past week!

I live in a room in a house of a homestay family who have 2 daughters aged 6 and 9. It was the older daughter's birthday, and I thought I'd give her a Raspberry Pi. However, although I managed to get a spare VGA screen, USB keyboard and mouse, I would've had to spend about $100 on the Pi, SD card, and HDMI to VGA adaptor.

I went to a scrapyard and found a Thinkpad T22 for $5.

It's great for learning to code in Logo, drawing with Kid Pix, running Mac System 7 with Basilisk II, or playing Alien Force, Asteroid, Pipe Dream, The Sims, SimCity, Bejeweled, Mahjong, even Age of Empires II. It can even play videos with VLC, though it doesn't have WiFi so parental controls over Internet access are quite simple: go to mummy's room to plug it in.

Getting the installation kits for old Windows versions was straightforward thanks to winworldpc, and I'm very grateful for it.

The Thinkpad T22 shipped with 128MB or 256MB RAM out of the box, which ought to be enough for an Alpine Linux install if nothing else. It's sad though that its specs are not enough to support a reasonably-modern OS in a more straightforward way. We should not have to rely on old bootleg Win98SE or the like to make this first-class hardware useful.

I was asked by a cousin to help find something old and definitely offline so his kid can learn to type his name, draw on MSPaint (or similar), things that we deem basic but for a below-10yo seem miraculous. He doesn't want to just throw him a tablet and let him be. He wants to have a feeling for computing "the good old way" (not as far as DOS but Win98SE was good-looking enough and could do what he needs).

Please don't trash Win98SE :)

I'm not trashing Win98SE, I'm just "trashing" the use of bootleg software which I do find a bit distasteful in this day and age. Linux has plenty of nice educational games IIRC, even xpaint is right there.

(BTW, FreeDOS comes with a bunch of cool GUI interfaces - not as nice-looking as Win98SE but quite usable. Do note that old OS's like FreeDOS, even Win9x can be a bit of a challenge to get to run even in a VM, since by default they will be hogging 100% of the CPU. There are HLT-issuing background tools that solve this for both FreeDOS/MS-DOS and Win9x, but you do have to get them installed and running properly.)

> I'm just "trashing" the use of bootleg software which I do find a bit distasteful in this day and age

It’s rather presumptive to assume GP is “bootlegging” software just because they got install media from WW. The Thinkpad T22 came with Windows 98SE originally, so it’s very possible the Windows license certificate was still stuck to the bottom of the machine.

I'm glad you've found it useful, hearing stories like this always brings a smile to my face. It's exactly why I created WinWorld so many years ago.

- Duff (Founder, WW)

I have a 20-year old machine that came with Windows ME. With the help of your site I've turned it into a Windows 98 SE gaming and DOS machine, it's more useful now. Thank you for the site.

A/UX is an interesting one, for one, it's Apple's original Unix release, which predates Darwin/Next by several years.

The other neat thing about A/UX was that it had a utility that let you format regular SCSI drives so that consumer-grad Macs could use them. This greatly extends the life of of System 6/7 devices as Apple-branded SCSI hard drives bigger than a couple megabytes from the early 1990s are super rare now. System 6 is pretty snappy even by modern standards (was written in assembly) and has backports for IE 3/4, IRC clients etc.

I have a friend who once owned several old Apple A/UX rack-mount servers, plus a few NeXTcubes. Sadly, he had a fire in his garage that destroyed everything.

EDIT: Fixed ref to NeXT - didn't realize the NeXTstation was different from the cube - he had cubes.

A bit from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17422822

What a blast from the past! Some notable titles:

    Acrobat 6
    FileMaker Pro 5
    Exchange 2000
    Encarta 1999
    Adobe Illustrator 10
    CorelDraw 6
    OmniPage Pro 12
    PageMaker 6
    Visio 2000 Pro
    MS Project 2000
    Mathematica 4
    Matlab 5
    CircuitMaker 2000
    SQL Server 2005
    VB 6 Enterprise

This is great, being able to download historic OS X releases. I wish that were possible for all releases up to the current one. How Apple implements planned obsolescence by making older releases unavailable really sucks.

Wait so I can download SimCity from this site and start procrastinating like it’s 1989?

i have not heard the word abandonware in like forever!

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