Virtually Fun
virtuallyfun.com · Group blog · on HN since 2017
Virtually Fun covers old operating systems, emulation, and software archaeology, such as Windows/386, OS/2, Alpha NT, and early Unix and BSD.
What HN saysHN commenters call it a gold mine for retro OS content and recommend it for articles like building Linux 0.11 on Windows 10.
96HN people shared it
45linked it in comments
114stories submitted
1.8Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2017people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Unauthorized Windows/3864 people · 91 points · first shared 2025 · 12 comments on HN
- 2Wanted: Console Text Editor for Windows3 people · 88 points · first shared 2018 · 94 comments on HN
- 3BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed3 people · 20 points · first shared 2023 · 3 comments on HN
- 4A modern RISC workstation for a modern (government) era3 people · 8 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 5Microsoft OS/2 2.03 people · 6 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 6Ttyplot – a real time plotting utility for the terminal3 people · 4 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 7Windows 2000 64-bit for Alpha AXP3 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · 2 comments on HN
- 8Ancient Unix is not actually open source3 people · 3 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 9Homepage3 people · first shared 2017
- 10So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?2 people · 163 points · first shared 2021 · 161 comments on HN
- 11Examining Windows 1.0 Hello.c2 people · 100 points · first shared 2020 · 49 comments on HN
- 12Windows Server 2008 IA64 Guest on HP Integrity VM (HP-UX)2 people · 39 points · first shared 2024 · 10 comments on HN
- 13EmuWoW Beta 1 (AXP Preview1)2 people · 8 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 14Today is 30 years since the launch of Windows 952 people · 7 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 15As reported a few days ago the Windows patches for FreeDOS were committed2 people · 7 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
yjftsjthsd-h · 2026-02-09
If you're into that kind of thing, May I strongly suggest https://virtuallyfun.com/ ? It's an absolute gold mine of amazing stuff along these lines
rasz · 2017-10-05
If you enjoy this type of content I highly recommend https://virtuallyfun.com
Example cool article: https://virtuallyfun.com/2015/10/09/building-linux-0-11-on-windows-10/
sillywalk · 2026-07-05
As a side-note, it's interesting that all of the released versions of NT on Alpha were 32 bit.
Raymond Chen has a blog post[0] about using Alpha to develop 64bit Windows before Itanium hardware was available.
Virtually Fun has some more excellent background on finding a compiler for 64bit Windows[1], finding a copy of Windows 2000 64bit for Alpha AXP[2], and a detailed article about making an ISO from the found copy.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-magazine/c…
[1] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/05/05/hiding-in-plain-sight-the-64bit-de…
[2] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/05/15/windows-2000-64-bit-for-alpha-axp/
[3] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/06/26/axp64-2210-installation-media-reco…
rnd0 · 2022-01-29
I prefer DOSBox-X to DOSBox because it's easier to run; but it sounds like neither one is what you want.
Have you heard of or tried "MS-DOS Player"? It seems to convert binaries into a format that Windows can understand. I think you have to do it on a per-file basis so it might be more of a headache than it's worth; but it's out there!
http://takeda-toshiya.my.coocan.jp/msdos/index.html (original site)
https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2011/02/11/ms-dos-player-2/
[edit]There's also winevdm which can run 16 bit windows binaries on 64 bit windows. It has DOS support but it's incomplete and it points back to MS-DOS player in it's readme...
https://github.com/otya128/winevdm
ksm · 2021-08-19
Not really, it was to bring Unix style multi-user remote terminal capability to DOS / OS/2 world.
Here's an interesting article on installing v1 of their product (on the same site there's follow-up articles on v2 of the Multiuser) - which builds on very early MS version of OS/2:
https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2017/11/17/installing-using-citrix-…
marcodiego · 2021-04-04
I think the best way out for SCO was if IBM bought them. But, if IBM did so, other companies could try the same attack in other opportunities. So, IBM took a route that could crush it to death, but we are almost two decades after it all began and the zombie has not been shot in the head. Hope the case effectively finishes this time.
It is really a shame. Caldera looked like a good distro:
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=sco
https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2013/03/27/caldera-open-linux/
rdpintqogeogsaa · 2021-03-12
Don't forget they also hold the copyright to UNIX[1]. They're doing absolutely nothing with it, presumably other than collecting royalties from Xinuos.
[1] https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2018/11/26/why-bsd-os-is-the-best-c…
einr · 2020-09-21
The Obscuritory -- https://obscuritory.com/ -- if you have any interest in the culture surrounding computer games or retrocomputing or even just obscure, weird things in general I can not recommend this enough
OS/2 Museum -- https://www.os2museum.com/
Fun With Virtualization -- https://virtuallyfun.com/
The Old New Thing -- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing
The Byte Cellar -- https://bytecellar.com/
McMansion Hell -- https://mcmansionhell.com/
fanf2 · 2020-08-17
2BSD is covered by the Ancient UNIX license though the status of the license is a bit murky https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2018/11/26/why-bsd-os-is-the-best-c…
beefhash · 2020-03-07
4.4BSD-Lite2 is the earliest they could do without risking some legal issues[1].
[1] https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2018/11/26/why-bsd-os-is-the-best-c…
gattilorenz · 2019-04-24
Well, usually the internet is large and you can find lots of guides :)
I'm an avid follower of virtuallyfun.com and right now the latest post is about installing AIX on QEMU. If you look into the qemu category ( https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/category/qemu/ ) you'll find OS X Server, Unixware and more.
The author, neozeed, is very friendly and you can leave him comments or shoot him an email and he usually answers pretty in depth.
As for OS 9, I'm not sure it is as refined and functional as SheepShaver on Windows yet, but I'm on OS X, where SheepShaver takes more effort to set up. There's a modified QEMU for enhanced OS 9 compatibility (I think more G3 emulation?) here, and people managed to install 9.2: https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=9028
geofft · 2019-01-14
Very cool! Last time I looked at this (and no, I don't remember why I looked at this) the state of the art was that while qemu didn't have a compatible card, MAME's MESS emulator had support: https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2013/12/09/virtual-xenix-the-intern… Getting it working under the qemu accelerator instead of the faithful-enough-for-video-games MAME emulator is a great result.
scruffyherder · 2018-10-18
I used the old AltaVista desktop search engine, fed it the usenet data, and setup some proxies and mod_rewrite / Substitution strings and got it online that way.
https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2017/02/25/personal-altavista-utzoo…
But it's a super great resource to have, a decade of usenet traffic, it's about 10GB uncompressed.
userbinator · 2026-03-13
It's possible they managed to do some rudimentary multitasking with DESQview (or worse...)
There were even hypervisors available, such as VM/386:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM/386
https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/06/13/re-visiting-vm-386/
roytam87 · 2025-12-31
NTDLL APIs are very stable[0] and you can even compile and run x86 programs targeting NT 3.1 Build 340[1] which will still work on win11.
[0] as long as you don't use APIs they decided to add and remove in a very short period (longer read: https://virtuallyfun.com/2009/09/28/microsoft-fortran-powerstation-1-0…
[1] https://github.com/roytam1/ntldd/releases/tag/v250831
crazygringo · 2025-10-05
So Mosaic did it in 1993.
I could have sworn WinHelp [1] (the help viewer built into Windows 3.0) did it in 1990, but looking it up it turns out their hyperlinks were dark green. My memory had changed them to blue retroactively...
A couple of images:
https://virtuallyfun.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/WinHelp-from-Windo…
https://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~mgoetsch/cali/Windows%20Configuration/Wi…
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinHelp
trollbridge · 2025-03-24
This is neat. Jason Stevens did the same thing in a 1990s-contemporary system… with a beta OS from the early 90s… on a 286 chassis upgraded to a 16-bit bus version of a 486:
https://virtuallyfun.com/2025/01/02/happy-2025/
Took hours to generate a paragraph of text. Be sure to turn up audio to enjoy hearing the hard disk clunking away.
ndiddy · 2025-03-04
After Compaq decided they wouldn't support Windows on Alpha, Microsoft continued using the hardware for developing 64-bit Windows (the previous Alpha releases were all 32-bit) until Itanium hardware became available. Here's a blogpost where someone goes over an Alpha 64-bit version of Windows 2000: https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/05/15/windows-2000-64-bit-for-alpha-axp/
rzzzt · 2025-02-18
The earliest(? - who knows) release of the port is from 1994, ran on 3.x and used the WinG and Win32s API:
- https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/historic/wdoom
- https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/historic/wdoom2
- https://virtuallyfun.com/2011/03/29/windoom-wing-win32s-on-windows-3-1…
jamesy0ung · 2024-07-22
For those interested in running Dell Unix, this is a good resource https://virtuallyfun.com/2020/12/01/dell-unix-on-86box/
lizknope · 2024-07-13
Good question but I don't know.
Apple did not create A/UX. It was created by UniSoft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniSoft
https://virtuallyfun.com/2021/09/19/so-what-is-the-deal-with-a-ux-anyw…
I'm guessing that Apple would have to pay a fee to both UniSoft and AT&T and maybe Sun was much larger and a partner with AT&T / Unix System Labs on SysV so maybe they could resell Solaris for cheaper.
Sun open sourced Solaris in 2008 for 2 years. Maybe AT&T / USL didn't care by then or maybe Sun's licensing agreement allowed them to do it. I don't know.
msla · 2024-07-12
There's also Bywater BASIC, which apparently isn't being developed anymore:
https://github.com/nerun/bwbasic
(It's also in the repos of many major Linux distributions as bwbasic.)
A blog post where the developer comments on it a bit:
https://virtuallyfun.com/2010/06/09/bywater-basic/
andrewf · 2024-07-12
Apple bolted Carbon APIs onto NeXTSTEP/Mach, and Microsoft bolted the OS/2 Presentation Manager onto NT (https://virtuallyfun.com/2021/05/19/presentation-manager-for-windows-n… so I'm not sure why bolting Carbon onto NT would be unreasonable.
itomato · 2024-07-12
Exploring the walled-off corridors of prep and chirp?
Maybe this will enable OS/2 PPC to run? More reading on NT & PPC: https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2020/08/02/the-lost-history-of-prep…
xeeeeeeeeeeenu · 2024-03-14
The OS/2 Museum has a more in-depth article about this, with actual screenshots:
https://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-future-that-never-was/
Also Virtually Fun (with a video):
https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/02/26/an-actual-look-at-microsoft-os-2-2…
csnover · 2023-12-29
Linode respond swiftly to abuse reports[0], block outgoing SMTP by default, and prevent so many people from even registering for services that it is the #1 question people ask on their IRC channel. What more should they do? What is “enough”?
90% of the spam that I receive from a DMARC-validated sender comes from Google; should every Gmail user be punished because Google aren’t “doing enough”?
[0] Linode twice threatened to shut off services within 24 hours due to some vigilante scanning the internet with a broken virus scanner and automatically sending reports: https://virtuallyfun.com/2014/04/23/dumbass-of-the-year-award-goes-to-… (n.b. this is not my site)
fortran77 · 2023-10-07
> I believe that is the result of Microsoft's peculiar inability to switch architectures.
This is simply not true.
I'm running Windows right now--to post this response--on an ARM Windows laptop. Microsoft has had Windows on RISC machines. Alpha, MIPS, PowerP and Itanium. They were all reado, should any of these architecturs take off. (See: https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/08/05/come-meet-tenox-check-out-the-nt-r…
Stop spreading misinformation.
SeenNotHeard · 2023-10-06
You're thinking of what is sometimes called "European MS-DOS 4.0" which did indeed have limited multitasking features, including shared memory and pipes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_4.0_(multitasking)
https://virtuallyfun.com/2013/03/17/european-ms-dos-4-00-aka-multitask…
It should not be confused with the mostly unrelated DOS 4.0 later released.
A Microsoft executive later said the multitasking DOS should probably not have been named "4.0" because it created a lot of confusion.
dengolius · 2023-07-03
Saw this[1] interesting post yesterday. And now I'm thinking about to buy my friend's old Lumia phone.
[1]https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/07/01/64bit-computing-on-a-budget/
stuaxo · 2023-04-19
Virtuallyfun has a go at running DesqView/X... and now I'm shocked to see it was all the way back in 2011 !
https://virtuallyfun.com/2011/03/27/desqviewx/
There's also a long running ticket in dosemu2 around some issues with DesqView/X
https://github.com/dosemu2/dosemu2/issues/606
In some more years it will probably be working fine there.