About the curator

I have been collecting emulated OS images since 2003, shortly after switching from Windows to Linux as my main OS. I remember reading about old timesharing OSes like ITS and TOPS-20 in places like the Jargon File and FOLDOC and wondering what they were like.

Shortly after that I found a site with tape images for a minimal ITS install, instructions on how to run it in SIMH, and a link to the SIMH site, and I downloaded and installed it immediately (or at least as close to immediately as I could on incredibly slow dialup; at the time I lived with my parents in a rural area without broadband).

On the SIMH site I found various other OSes like RSTS and early Unix and downloaded those as well. After that I was hooked and kept finding more OSes and emulators to install. I soon started to organize the image folders, write generic launch scripts, add documentation, and write notes. The thought of somehow releasing my collection publicly someday was always in the back of my mind.

However, it was only in the last several years that I seriously considered releasing it and really put serious effort into adding proper metadata, cleaning up the collection to have a truly consistent structure (it was somewhat consistent almost as soon as I had multiple images, but there were still a decent number of exceptions), and writing a graphical launcher. I now regret not doing it much earlier (virtualization on commonly-available desktop hardware has been decent enough to release a VM like this for quite a while). I have an extremely crippling tendency to stay quiet, not due to social anxiety but just inertia and a lack of things to talk about (sometimes real, and sometimes just perceived, depending on the situation).

It’s only quite recently that I’ve realized how much my tendency to stay quiet has held me back; even most other autistics seem to always have stuff to say and be quite a bit more active than I am (or at least a large majority of autistics who are active online at all seem to be). I have realized I need to try to push past my tendency to stay quiet as best I can; I will probably never be as good at finding random crap to talk about as almost everyone else, but I have lots of ideas for stuff I can make content on and lots of knowledge on computing history and OS development.

Going forwards, I will be posting regular updates on new OSes I’m installing and emulators I’m working on, as well as tours/reviews of OSes I’ve already installed. I am also planning to add a wiki integrated with the OS museum launcher at some point, as well as an “exhibit” feature with lists of OSes relevant to particular topics and short articles on how each OS is relevant.

I’m also working on a QNX-like RTOS called UX/RT (which is more of an internal name; I need to come up with a name for the reference distro). I’m likely within one commit of getting it to run simple user programs, although I haven’t doen much with it for a while because I was trying to get the OS museum ready for release. I did actually have some people from a major conglomerate interested in using it as a QNX replacement (to the point where they paid me to fly out to meet them) but they indefinitely suspended their project for reasons outside my control. Once I’m working on it again, I will be posting content about it as well. Basically my goal with it is to make a better Linux than Linux and a better QNX than QNX (at least for workstations and embedded systems). Hopefully I get commercial interest in it again as it is the kind of thing at least a few companies would be interested in using for embedded systems if it’s fully realized, but who knows.