Today someone (who is not on Mastodon) released a collection of more than 570 distinct operating systems, pre-installed with VM configurations for the 250+ different platforms, going back all the way to 1948.

virtualosmuseum.org/

Now, I have to admit I'm posting this without trying it myself, as I'm running low on disk space on this machine.

Because the full download is 121GB (174GB unzipped!). There is also a lighter version at 14GB that will download stuff on demand.

#retrocomputing

The Virtual OS Museum

The Virtual OS Museum is a curated, pre-installed collection of over 1,700 operating systems and standalone applications spanning the entire history of stored-program computing, from the Manchester Baby of 1948 to the present day.

^{Andrew Warkentin (The Virtual OS Museum)}

this is not well known, so i thought i'd share this -
way back in 2020, ars released a short interview with rand miller about myst and the challenges of the cd-rom format. it's mildly interesting, but obviously cut from a much larger tapestry.

they eventually released the full, 2h interview with rand, but very few people saw it. in the extended version, he talks about the very early days of working with HyperCard, from the Manhole to Cosmic Osmo to Spelunx. he goes into obscene amounts of detail with the constraints of working with HC and 80s/90s macs, writing custom XCMD and XFCNs, building in 3d with StrataVision, and using Debabelizer to build palettes.

he does an amazing job of explaining what the constraints were for computing in that era. for anyone curious about what it was like making games in the 80s/90s, i can think of few other interviews that express the realities and joys of working in confined space so well:

youtube.com/watch?v=5qxg0ykOcg…

#retrocomputing #macintosh #vintageApple #hypercard #myst #riven

Passed by a second hand store yesterday. Picked up two boxes of 3.5" disks and a small TV with AV, VGA, Scart, S-Video and RF inputs. As one does.

#RetroComputing

Seventeen years ago! I bought this multi-million dollar hoard of Sun servers from a scrap yard for $300. After testing, fixing, and swapping parts to max out some of them, I traded a couple for an SGI Onyx for the museum, a few more for parts of what eventually became my personal 16-proc Origin-2000, and kept two as compute servers for my film making.

(A maxxed-out E4000 has 14 x 400 Mhz UltraSparc II's, and 14 gig of ram (In 128meg sticks! Ha ha ha. Warm.)).

#RetroComputing #SunMicrosystems #HomeLab

I apologize for bringing this into the world.

#retrocomputing #nevergonnagiveyouup

The book A Programmer's Guide to COMMON LISP by Deborah Tatar (Digital Press, 1987), along with the errata, is now online with permission from the author.

archive.org/details/a-programm…

My review of the book:

journal.paoloamoroso.com/readi…

#CommonLisp #lisp #books #retrocomputing

A Programmer's Guide to COMMON LISP : Tatar, Deborah G : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

The book A Programmer's Guide to Common Lisp by Deborah G Tatar, uploaded with the kind permission of the author.  Includes 7 pages of handwritten corrections.

^{Internet Archive}

You know, I'm something of a prompt engineer myself.

#AppleII #retrocomputing

The earliest DOS source code was found on printer paper in Tim Paterson's garage so we've open sourced it on 86-DOS 1.00’s 45th anniversary! This is next-level software archaeology for preservation, and plain ol’ curiosity. #DOS #RetroComputing

opensource.microsoft.com/blog/…

Continuing the story of early DOS development | Microsoft Open Source Blog

In 2018 we (re)-open-sourced MS‑DOS 1.25 and 2.11, and more recently in 2024 we were able to make the source for MS‑DOS 4.0 available to the public as well. Today, on 86-DOS 1.

^{Scott Hanselman (Microsoft Open Source Blog)}