
WinWorld: online museum of vintage, abandoned, and pre-release software - peter_d_sherman
https://winworldpc.com/library/operating-systems
======
cr0sh
I didn't see it on there; it's missing Monkey Linux, which was the first Linux
I installed, on a 386 "laptop" (Compaq SLT/386) with 6 MB of RAM.

Why 6 MB? Well, I bought it used without a battery, so I built one out of old
NiCd cells from used cell phone batteries; this monster of electrical tape,
hot glue, and hope did not fit into the spot meant for it, so with some
creative dremeling and removal of a stick of RAM, I got it to "fit".

Monkey Linux was unique in one special way - it ran on top of the DOS
filesystem, IIRC, in it's own partition. I think at the time I had Caldera's
OpenDOS installed (speaking of which - it's not on the site, either). You
could easily copy files back and forth from Monkey to MS-DOS. I never looked
at it too deeply, but I bet everything was perm'd 777 root access, too - or
something close.

I quickly moved on from Monkey to Turbo Linux 2.0 - but it served me well to
learn a bit on (more like freshen up what I had known already from using AIX
at a former employer).

Here's some links to Monkey:

[http://projectdevolve.tripod.com/index.htm](http://projectdevolve.tripod.com/index.htm)

[http://www.ipt.ntnu.no/~knutb/linux486/download/monkey/](http://www.ipt.ntnu.no/~knutb/linux486/download/monkey/)

I don't know if you can get a complete download between those two links or
not, but if WinWorld wants a full copy, they can contact me and I can send it
to them.

Same for Caldera OpenDOS. I'm not sure what the last version of it I have of
it, though.

~~~
nineteen999
> Monkey Linux was unique in one special way - it ran on top of the DOS
> filesystem, IIRC, in it's own partition.

Not unique at all; Slackware was installable to a UMSDOS partition in the same
way back in the mid nineties. That's how a lot of us got started since you
could get your feet wet without destroying your DOS/Windows partition.

The performance was abysmal though, and this was apparent as soon as you got
brave enough to partition your hard drive (or add a secondary drive) to
install to ext2 native.

------
jannes
Any idea what the copyright situation is on these downloads?

The page for Windows XP (Whistler) shows this message:

> Microsoft has asserted their copyright status regarding Windows XP. WinWorld
> respects this and therefore will not host Windows XP.

> Microsoft still supports various incarnations of this software, and its
> availability competes with newer Windows product sales. Windows XP is not
> rare or in danger of disappearing, and therefore has no real place on
> WinWorld anyway.

However, the pre-release versions are available for download?!

~~~
duff_ww
Abandonware is definitely in a grey area when it comes to copyright.

In our experience, most companies (at least the ones that are still around)
don't mind the distribution of outdated and unsupport products provided no
profit is being gained from said distribution.

Microsoft, and likely other software companies, are at least vaguely aware of
our existence. We received a DMCA notice from them approximately five years
ago, regarding the RTM versions of Windows XP and Office 2000. Since those
were removed we haven't had an issue.

Given you aren't going to see people using Whistler in production use, they
didn't seem to bother with requesting any pre-release software be removed.

The short version is, I consider it both safe and ethical to use any software
on WinWorld for experimental, personal and educational purposes. I only advise
caution if you're considering use in a place of business; proper licensing is
of course important in that situation.

\- Duff (Founder, WW)

~~~
cr0sh
Hey Duff, there's a couple of missing operating systems I noted here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22099717](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22099717)

Monkey Linux and Caldera OpenDOS; I gave some links for the former, I think
there are sources out there of the latter. If you want or need anything not
there, let me know, I probably have it in my archives at home.

~~~
aidenn0
IIRC OpenDOS was a rebrand of Novell DOS, which was a rebrand of DR-DOS, which
has a page: [https://winworldpc.com/product/dr-
dos/7x](https://winworldpc.com/product/dr-dos/7x)

------
peterburkimsher
WinWorld has been particularly useful to me this past week!

I live in a room in a house of a homestay family who have 2 daughters aged 6
and 9. It was the older daughter's birthday, and I thought I'd give her a
Raspberry Pi. However, although I managed to get a spare VGA screen, USB
keyboard and mouse, I would've had to spend about $100 on the Pi, SD card, and
HDMI to VGA adaptor.

I went to a scrapyard and found a Thinkpad T22 for $5.

It's great for learning to code in Logo, drawing with Kid Pix, running Mac
System 7 with Basilisk II, or playing Alien Force, Asteroid, Pipe Dream, The
Sims, SimCity, Bejeweled, Mahjong, even Age of Empires II. It can even play
videos with VLC, though it doesn't have WiFi so parental controls over
Internet access are quite simple: go to mummy's room to plug it in.

Getting the installation kits for old Windows versions was straightforward
thanks to winworldpc, and I'm very grateful for it.

~~~
duff_ww
I'm glad you've found it useful, hearing stories like this always brings a
smile to my face. It's exactly why I created WinWorld so many years ago.

\- Duff (Founder, WW)

~~~
ralphc
I have a 20-year old machine that came with Windows ME. With the help of your
site I've turned it into a Windows 98 SE gaming and DOS machine, it's more
useful now. Thank you for the site.

------
hadlock
A/UX is an interesting one, for one, it's Apple's original Unix release, which
predates Darwin/Next by several years.

The other neat thing about A/UX was that it had a utility that let you format
regular SCSI drives so that consumer-grad Macs could use them. This greatly
extends the life of of System 6/7 devices as Apple-branded SCSI hard drives
bigger than a couple megabytes from the early 1990s are super rare now. System
6 is pretty snappy even by modern standards (was written in assembly) and has
backports for IE 3/4, IRC clients etc.

~~~
cr0sh
I have a friend who once owned several old Apple A/UX rack-mount servers, plus
a few NeXTcubes. Sadly, he had a fire in his garage that destroyed everything.

EDIT: Fixed ref to NeXT - didn't realize the NeXTstation was different from
the cube - he had cubes.

------
dang
A bit from 2018:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17422822](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17422822)

------
rkagerer
What a blast from the past! Some notable titles:

    
    
        Acrobat 6
        FileMaker Pro 5
        Exchange 2000
        Encarta 1999
        Adobe Illustrator 10
        CorelDraw 6
        OmniPage Pro 12
        PageMaker 6
        Visio 2000 Pro
        MS Project 2000
        Mathematica 4
        Matlab 5
        CircuitMaker 2000
        SQL Server 2005
        VB 6 Enterprise

------
classified
This is great, being able to download historic OS X releases. I wish that were
possible for all releases up to the current one. How Apple implements planned
obsolescence by making older releases unavailable really sucks.

------
koolba
Wait so I can download SimCity from this site and start procrastinating like
it’s 1989?

------
zojirushibottle
i have not heard the word abandonware in like forever!

