The World of Vintage Operating Systems | Hacker News Reader

The World of Vintage Operating Systems

winworldpc.com

162 pointsKoshkin62 comments

Anyone interested in FlexOS - an interesting operating system which seems to have been virtually forgotten - I have made a PDF of the 1991 Byte Magazine article on it:

https://github.com/bootrino/vintage_software/raw/master/1991...

It's a real time, multitasking, multiuser operating system from Digital Research.

It was protected mode and allowed the user to run DOS applications in protected mode.

It's weird how something like this got zero traction back in the day because features like this were way out on the cutting edge.

CTOS! Or BTOS as Burroughs called it. An early microprocessor OS written by Convergent Technologies for business users. Ran in 128K!

It was based on a message-passing system that allowed diskless workstations to connect over HDLC to a server. Zero-administration networking (just run the cable and it came up).

Derived from an Intel message model RMX86(?) it shipped on 1M machines in the 80's

Also a shame there are no releases of Microware OS-9

I believe there are some images floating around in CD-i homebrew and emulation circles.

I used BTOS for about 5 years in the mid 80's. I loved it, we used a 4GL programming language from Progress Software.

My first job out of college was working on BTOS! I worked in the file system, the video driver, the kernel, drivers (keyboard/mouse/card scanner), network, cache and on and on. My favorite job ever!

I was enthusiastic to post a link to a comment about the ingenious syscall convention in CTOS[0] that exploited x86 segments I learned about a few years ago on HN. I did some searching to dig it up and realized you posted it. >smile<

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12290436

Wow, impressive collection! After leaving the Commodore world I started on MS-DOS 3.30 on my 10 MHz 8088 with 40 MB Seagate ST-251 MFM hard drive.

Amazing to read the summary of the history of DOS and the lack of features in 1.0. Gives you perspective on how the important thing for any software project is to just get that MVP out. I imagine there were people at Microsoft that were thinking, “Who will use this? It doesn’t even support folders! All files have to be in root.”

DOS was essentially a clone of CP/M, which did not have a hierarchical directory structure either. When the main form of storage were floppy disks which only held a few hundred KB, you generally didn't have enough files to need a directory hierachy.

The addition of hierarchical directories to DOS was driven by the inclusion of hard drives in the PC XT.

In fact floppies themselves were the folders - you'd have a box of floppies on your desk and pick the one you needed for whatever you were working on.

Apparently it took DOS 2.0 copying ideas from Unix (which was also being sold by Microsoft) like hierarchical directories or pipes, that made DOS win over CP/M-86 by anything other than "it's included by default, most of the time". At the time, there was strong danger that the well known and accepted CP/M could make a comeback on PC.

DOS 2.0 was originally supposed to be a single-user version of Xenix. There were some undocumented options to make it more Unix-like, which were removed in later versions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo8NG8T4rWs

The connection with Xenix is also pretty clear from the file names and comments in the released source code:

https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/... https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/...

I don't need to watch the video to know that two of these options were entries in CONFIG.SYS, one of them "SWITCHAR" as I recall. It would cause DOS to use forward slash instead of backslash for separating components of a pathname, and it would use hyphens instead of forward slashes for command line options, both just like Unix.

You are correct, and the other one is AVAILDEV. Set it to false, and device names like CON only refer to the device when prefixed with "/dev/".

Microsoft did have a reason to remove these features: compatibility with batch files.

"\dev\" actually remained special in all later versions, in that it can always be used to open a device, even if that directory doesn't exist. This could break a common idiom in batch files to test if a path is valid:

C:\> if exist \dev\nul echo Yup, still there

(I don't have a recent version of Windows to test this on, interested to see if it still works!)

These seem to all date from the '80s or later. Quite a few earlier systems are available to run under simulation -- including historically interesting ones for the PDP-10, PDP-8, and other DEC hardware. Here's a starter list, from the SIMH project: http://simh.trailing-edge.com/software.html

I’m big into retrocomputing, particularly retro telecom and odd enterprise/business systems. (Have me an SGI and DEC Alpha right now, and hope to get a VAX machine and many other things in the future).

One particularly interesting system to me is the HP 3000[0] 2100and 1000 series[1] of real time computers (which had a number of generations and name changes, and ofc as it’s an HP machine, now lends its name to printer). I plan on buying one, though it’s rather expensive as most of the machines I have left on my list are, so in the meantime I figured I play with a SIMH emulator.

These things ran a fun little OS called RTE or real time executive and man, I’ve never had such a hard time understanding an OS. I’ve only played with it briefly and am not very familiar, documentation is archived, but a bit hard to follow for me sometimes. As far as I know, it dates back to the 60s/70s with it being updated through the series computers all the way through to the 90s. I’m not a huge *nix fan in a greater world of operating systems, but I gained a newfound respect for UNIX and it’s descendants after using this operating system from around the same time. Though perhaps the real time nature of the system adds to the foreign feeling.

I’ve got a screen grab showing me following a basic tutorial, running some program, and then using it to list process and a few other things regarding storage I don’t understand yet: https://imgur.com/a/iqYQdQ8

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_3000

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_2100

The HP3000 platform family (classic and later RISC) is very different architecturally from the HP2100/1000 family and runs a totally different, much more friendly OS.

Ah, for some reason I thought it ran RTE as well. I think maybe because the 3000 and 2100/1000 both had SPL compilers and I’ve never seen that on any other arch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Multi-Programming_Executive

I spent five years living in the HP 3000 world around the year 2000. I feel some nostalgia for the operating system[0]

I am aware of one software package for the 3000 (Qedit) which was updated as recently as 2019[1].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Multi-Programming_Executi...

[1] http://www.robelle.com/ftp/changes/qeditchg.pdf

This just makes me tremendously sad. We collectively forgot how to design good UI.

The UIs we have today are beautiful and minimal, you are viewing through rose colored classes here.

> beautiful and minimal

I am not sure who is viewing using rose tinted glasses. You or me? :-)

UI should be functional and as complex as it needs to be. Basically opposite of beautiful and minimal.

Restoring old computers I have been surprised on how much those old UIs sucked bad compared with how I remember them:

I love the Amiga but the Amiga Workbench? Horrible with its useless bar minimizing, a button to put a windows on top (how do you put a window on top when the button is covered by another window?!), Only one way to resize a window from the bottom right...

Old X window systems: bump the mouse and your focus is gone, it is basically a UI system you need to use from the command line.

Atari ST one? One application out of 2 asks you to manually change the resolution to be able to run...

From all the ones I tried out from this era, only the Classic Mac feels usable TBH.

Don't get me started on the old ball powered mice, they sucked. Even one in a very good working condition and cleaned up is a such a huge pain to use today...

> Old X window systems: bump the mouse and your focus is gone, it is basically a UI system you need to use from the command line.

Haha. Here you got me. In X windows "focus follow mouse" is consistent at least in normal WMs. You should see Windows 10 for a disaster implementation (keyboard focus in one window and mouse focus in another).

Gray on gray is beautifull ? I agree with minimal. It looks like the developers who add useful features are punished.

Worth noting that the website also hosts a large collection of vintage software, not just operating systems. Plenty of goodies in there!

For those wondering about other operating systems, IIRC winworld started with Windows betas, and focused on stuff you could easily run on typical PC hardware first, the rest came depending on uploaders

Nothing makes me feel older than seeing Windows 98 and 2000 being classified as vintage :-(.

Even Windows XP is mentioned in the list. I know lot of computers are still on XP. :)

No Amiga OS listed but loads of granular of others less popular OS are?

Guess there's a lot of more work to be done there!

Well, the legality of making copyrighted software available for free and even providing serials really makes it a warez site. They see to be trying to skirt the boundaries of the law by mostly providing software images from disks of software from defunct companies pre2000.

I could totally see Microsoft or Apple issuing a DMCA here, even though nothing hosted here would even approach a risk to revenue.

I believe this site has been around for a while already.

I think Macintosh Repository does the same thing, just trying to avoid any legal issues by posting mostly abandonware. That being said; there’s a lot of commercial software there.

I was also surprised by the omission, but then realised they're hosting archives of the installers.

Much of classic AmigaDOS is in the Kickstart ROM (with the workbench environment loaded from disk). I'm guessing that as an OS it's too tightly integrated with the hardware to make sense in this context?

I doubt that is the reason. Kickstart ROMs are available for download, both legally from Cloanto as part of "Amiga Forever", and otherwise.

But what would you install them on? (aside an emulator of course). As ROMs they seem more a part of the hardware than the other stuff there.

But hey, it could just be lack of interest on the part of their audience. It looks like they've got an image of the atari dos disk, and gem (for msdos albeit) but not the TOS ROMs... /shrug

Well, aside from emulators, you could "install" them onto your own ROM chips for use in your own Amiga, if so inclined.

The current Amiga copyright owners are remarkably litigious. WinWorldPC tries not to step on any toes (this is why they refuse to post XP - see the big red notice here [1] - even though it's beloved, relatively useful, and long out-of-print and out-of-support). AmigaOS wouldn't stand a chance.

[1] https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-xp/final

Ah, never thought I'd see this on the fp of Hacker News. Spent too much of my youth on WinBoards, Old OS Forums, ABWnet and MacDomain.

It is good to see WinWorld still alive and kicking, it makes me miss those old phpBB boards (even with the endless drama, abuse and flaming). I wonder how many of the old admins/moderators are still around?

All the screenshots for Windows ME are bluescreens. It's not wrong!

I ran WinME in production on a generic White Box PC for 4 years during the era of its introduction, I found it reliable and performant, I've never quite gotten the reputation it has. I guess my experience with it was a unicorn.

The first release crashed out of the box. They released a huge update for it very soon after it came out that was roughly the size of the base OS that made it functional.

I had a similar experience with Vista (64-bit). I always ran it on at least a dual-core CPU with lots of RAM, and it was more stable than XP and ran fast enough. All the hardware I wanted to use with it worked. The only awesome things about it were the start menu search bar and Aero, otherwise it was fine (boring, did what it needed to). I seem to be the only one with that opinion.

Same here... back in the day we had the theory that the faster the PC running ME was, the less stable the system got. Can anyone confirm this?

My then brand new Sony Vaio Pentium 3 laptop running Me would BSOD at least once or twice a week for no particular reason at all. Once it was available, I installed Win 2000 and had zero issues ruling out faulty hardware.

Counter to this, I also ran Vista without issue on various AMD machines for a few years. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I blame drivers...

The particular bits of hardware in your PC likely played well with the default device drivers. Maybe they were even reference designs. OS upgrades, especially of that era, tended to be randomly problematic mostly due to device driver issues.

I had (have, I put Win98 on it for gaming) an eMachines that came with ME and it worked fine, but that meant they tested it and had all the drivers for it so ymmv.

This was my editor of choice for a long time back in the 90s - https://winworldpc.com/product/ibm-e-editor/3x

this is nice. I`m in need of a mac os 9 iso to play old games in my powermac g4

Check out https://macintoshgarden.org/ and https://macintoshrepository.org/ for isos and software for os9.

Macinstoshgarden is great. They have somes file formats that i`m not used, that used weird mac only compression software, but still great resource to have.

Seems a bit light on UNIX. Minix and Coherent are both missing.

Neither of them are Unix proper :)

Neither are Linux or FreeBSD; but they're still there.

I still have a set of SCO Xenix 386 (Santa Cruz Operation) 5.25-inch installation floppies, including the license activation key. (And yes, I have a nearly contemporaneous PC with a 5.25-inch floppy drive).

Of the listed *nix systems, I've worked on about half over my IT career. One that is also missing is Apollo/DOMAIN, which was eventually bought by HP.

Incidentally, Banyan VINES was a network OS like Novell Netware, rather than something a user would run on a workstation.

There is a Russian open archive containing all Unices. I cannot remember the URL, but will check when I get out of the airplane.

EDIT: Got it: http://mirrors.pdp-11.ru

This list reminded me of TempleOS. Looked up the Wikipedia article and learned Terry passed. I wasn’t a fan, but I remembered his posts on HN.

Digging this, but no love for the Apple IIGS GUI?

Whatever happened to FlexOs from Digital Research?

It became Real/32. Too bad the 286 version (using LOADALL to virtualize real mode) doesn't seem to be available anywhere, would be fun to see how it actually performed...

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