MattRocks wrote on 2026-08-28, 00:36:

Open source code often lives on in other products, but I'm not quite sure what your point is. There have been 64bit versions of BSDs since 1994-1995.

Just being pedantic. You said "The evolutionary tree persists today through TrueOS and GhostBSD", but since TrueOS is dead, that tree does not persist today. You have a point with 64-bit, it just doesn't sound retro to me.

What interested me in the x86 lineage is that it lost to Linux specifically because of legal delays.

I know that's the prevailing narrative, but I think that's just part of the question. BSD in those days was still tied to work stations, and needed pretty hefty hardware to run fine. Linux was much more agile and ran on hardware with much less power (i.e. hardware people actually had at home). Embedded Linux became a thing (and desktop Linux never became a thing), though not on x86 of course.

BSD was far ahead of Linux, and Novell's big legal holdup is specifically what enabled Linux to get ahead of BSD.

Of course BSD was far ahead, it was a few decades ahead. But that never stopped new products from getting adopted and taking over. Linux got its start because of nerdy hobbyists, not because of big corporations - that came later. BSD just wasn't suitable for those people, even though they couldn't care less about legal matters.

Many users prefer BSD to Linux

User of what exactly? Most users prefer Windows to MacOS, and calling MacOS "BSD" is a bit disingeneous, even if technically correct (it's not that MacOS users would know or care).

For me, the lineage is like a shadow of an alternative universe in which Windows NT never had a chance

BSD (or Linux) vs. Windows is a whole nother discussion. Windows NT as a server OS could maybe have been blocked by a succesful BSD, but MS would never have stopped trying, and it would always have resulted in the desktop OS we know today.

JAL

jal wrote on 2026-08-28, 10:12:

You said "The evolutionary tree persists today through TrueOS and GhostBSD", but since TrueOS is dead, that tree does not persist today.

Oh I see. In my terminology you are referring to the dead branch.

I'd push back on the workstation perspective because 386BSD was demonstrated on a 2MB 386 laptop. The slightly more demanding FreeBSD 1.0 is 386BSD plus original service packs. So I don't think BSD (386BSD or FreeBSD 1.x) was inherently unsuitable for home hobbyists. And those hobbyists were not hackers seeking short term gains, they were enthusiasts giving their time to something revolutionary - the Novell lawsuit absolutely would have influenced where they chose to invest their hopes and efforts.

P.S. I mentioned MacOS precisely because most people forget (or just never knew) it is the most mainstream member of the BSD family. Providing an evidently unbiased usability study, my daughter definitely prefers MacOS to Windows - she is 4yo and can't yet read 😉

She turns on her iMac. Clicks the familiar icon that represents her account. Enters her numeric password. Clicks familiar icons in the dock. Ejects DVDs. Pushes in DVDs. Navigates from inside DVD menus. "Let me show you how it's done," she says. For contrast, she throws a fit with Windows - it spends time showing animations instead of confessing it's slow, the start menu keeps changing, and half the time it throws up cryptic alphanumeric messages. And, because she is still developing her emotions, she will actually punch the screen!

Note that I do have a soft spot for the BSDs, I'm no Linux fanboy. My daily driver is Windows, if only because I have a single company-supplied laptop I use for work and leisure. I used to run Ubuntu on a PC years ago, but didn't want to invest in new hardware when it became too sluggish.

I installed MS-DOS and then Windows 3.11.
Lately I was wondering, is W3.11 really useful for retro stuff? I rarely use it.
For what I do I don't see the point of having it but I'm sure that my experience is limiting my field of view on the subject.
To copy files I have a CF sticking from the back (slot adapter), I don't use a LAN card in it.

Thanks for any input.

Nexxen wrote on 2026-08-28, 12:31:

Lately I was wondering, is W3.11 really useful for retro stuff? I rarely use it.

If you mean retro games I'd say no. There were very little games that required Win3 and didn't run on Win95. Of course you could use Win3 for retro word processing, or retro spread sheeting, but admittedly not many people would do that 😁. I love the Win3 aesthetic though.

JAL

Floppinux! For that 486DX you really want to boot and run from a single floppy. Like KolibriOS it's new code for old hardware, but in this case Linux.

https://github.com/w84death/floppinux

I'm surprised no one has mentioned os8088 here yet.

Vibe-coded or not, it's really impressive what it can do even on a 4.7MHz 8088 PC. It has a graphical user interface and preemptive multitasking. It already has quite a few applications for it as well!

Nexxen wrote on 2026-08-28, 12:31:

Lately I was wondering, is W3.11 really useful for retro stuff? I rarely use it.

I don't know if you remember but when Windows 95 launched, many still preferred working directly in MS-DOS and that tells us something.

Windows 3x had been a very good file manager with overlapping windows, drag and drop, minimising, copy and paste - it was genuinely useful when there were lots of changing files being dragged around. But, for home entertainment it just consumed resources.

Today's 386-586 retro PCs are no longer the RAM starved and overworked machines they were, so we look to the biggest and most elaborate file managers (Windows 3x or GEOS), and we use some of our supercharged 368 PC resource, and then we realise we have no workloads to execute because the actual software we intended the retro machine to run was itself intended to run on MS-DOS.

The exception is if you're building an early multimedia workstation with CD-ROM and MPEG accelerator, because that was the start of Windows APIs as an ecosystem.

digger wrote on 2026-08-28, 13:53:

I'm surprised no one has mentioned os8088 here yet. […]
Show full quote

I'm surprised no one has mentioned os8088 here yet.

Vibe-coded or not, it's really impressive what it can do even on a 4.7MHz 8088 PC. It has a graphical user interface and preemptive multitasking. It already has quite a few applications for it as well!

OS8088 has a C64 emulator. There are thousands of apps for C64, including the GEOS desktop.

But, apparently, OS8088 is AI generated. Clever, but now even retro is being changed by AI.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-08-28, 14:31:

Nexxen wrote on 2026-08-28, 12:31:

Lately I was wondering, is W3.11 really useful for retro stuff? I rarely use it.

I don't know if you remember but when Windows 95 launched, many still preferred working directly in MS-DOS and that tells us something.

That's what happened in my house. We tried it when a more stable version came out but I never liked it as there were issues.
98SE was the loved upgrade.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-08-28, 14:31:

Windows 3x had been a very good file manager with overlapping windows, drag and drop, minimising, copy and paste - it was genuinely useful when there were lots of changing files being dragged around. But, for home entertainment it just consumed resources.

It was better, and came with Excel and Word. After learning Lotus 123... 😀

MattRocks wrote on 2026-08-28, 14:31:

Today's 386-586 retro PCs are no longer the RAM starved and overworked machines they were, so we look to the biggest and most elaborate file managers (Windows 3x or GEOS), and we use some of our supercharged 368 PC resource, and then we realise we have no workloads to execute because the actual software we intended the retro machine to run was itself intended to run on MS-DOS.

The exception is if you're building an early multimedia workstation with CD-ROM and MPEG accelerator, because that was the start of Windows APIs as an ecosystem.

Nope, mostly retrogaming.

jal wrote on 2026-08-28, 13:05:

Nexxen wrote on 2026-08-28, 12:31:

Lately I was wondering, is W3.11 really useful for retro stuff? I rarely use it.

If you mean retro games I'd say no. There were very little games that required Win3 and didn't run on Win95. Of course you could use Win3 for retro word processing, or retro spread sheeting, but admittedly not many people would do that 😁. I love the Win3 aesthetic though.

JAL

It was a very nice GUI, I liked it but it wasn't that interesting of an OS. I used the PC to play games in DOS while my father used it for Word and other programs.
I appreciate it more today.
I had my 486 to play with, but the pentium my parents used was way better for newer games 😀

IIRC, you can use the Win3x shell on Win9x.

Edit: Or, maybe that was Win NT 3.1 shell. I don't recall but I'm pretty sure running a 3.x shell on a later Windows OS is one of the bastardisations I tried.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-08-28, 17:59:

IIRC, you can use the Win3x shell on Win9x.

I never tried that but I do have a pc with 98 and a W3 folder (I reused the disk for W98).
My W3 experience is mostly nostalgia at this point.
I remembered that a classmate wanted to know which was faster with file transfer, DOS or W3.
It was in '93, near the end of school. Time flew I guess 🤣

Nexxen wrote on 2026-08-28, 19:12:

I remembered that a classmate wanted to know which was faster with file transfer, DOS or W3.

With or without the final cache flush? 😉

I think the question is revealing though. People perceived MS-DOS and MS-Windows as possessing competing file-transfer technologies..