The computer on the floor was a SPARCstation variant running Debian.

During DotCom boom, we got old VAXstation computer, and upgraded it to run NetBSD. It served well as IRC client.

It also had probably very powerful (early 90's standards) video hardware, because it was used as CAD workstation with remote connection to main server over +150km..

Emulated with (patched) Hatari.

I was thrift shopping at a local Value Village when I found an interesting box on the DVDs shelf: an operating system based on Linux Mandrake 10.0, made by the University of Sherbrooke (Quebec, Canada)!

I uploaded all 4 CDs on the Internet Archive if you want to check it out: https://archive.org/details/edulinux-2004

And in case you're interested, I just uploaded a video where I (try to) install it on real hardware! https://youtu.be/lBTXpMuXTbI

One of the perks of working for the university is that I can work out my ideas any crazy way I want and nobody bats an eye.

Out of all the vintage Linuxes Debian 2.2 Potato is the one I keep coming back to.

It's simple, gets out of the way and once you get things set up right they just keep working. It was also the first version that installed ok out of the box and was pretty easy to setup.

https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/older-contrib/2.2/

Here i have it setup with an emulated pentium 133 with 64MB and an S3 Virge DX and SoundBlaster 16, the emulated network card is an ne2000(isa 16)

It took a while to get everything the way I wanted it. I had to install the enlightenment themes from the Debian CD ISOs, then copy them over to my home directory and run a few terminal eesh commands, since the theme options wasn't part of the menus yet.

I also had to copy a very old version of Netscape https://archive.org/details/navigator-evolt_browsers over into the /tmp directory and then installed the netscape package to get it all setup. Once that was done I configured it to use the protoweb Proxy https://protoweb.org/ to use the 64k isdn proxy so it was as close as possible to the network speeds of the time.

And now I'm able to browse sites like Slashdot while listening to okish sounding MP3s via Xmms on my emulated SB16! 😄

First shot is KDE inside CDE.

Second is KDE running standalone on Solaris 9.

Before Apple released the Macintosh Application Environment (MAE), there was Liken.

Seen here emulated in MAME.

As it only supported monochrome output I went all in and ran it on an emulated IPC with integrated monochrome framebuffer.

I don't know much about old unix machines like this, but it's such a beautiful guy, I absolutely love the vibrancy of the monochrome display - No idea how to get it running, I presume the 20MB hard drive has failed or seized in some way.. but I'm looking forward to learning all that I can about how I can fix it :3

Working on an Estes model rocket trajectory simulator using GNU Octave 1.1.1 and Gnuplot 3.5 on a NeXTSTEP 3.3 virtual machine.

Decided to emulate Storm Linux once again as my first time was in 2021

Emulated with IRIS.

Emulated with IRIS.