Periodically I get asked questions about computing in the age before Linux, OSX, Microsoft Windows (NT based), Google, and Stack Overflow. Sometimes I encourage people to look historical systems because I believe they would learn from these early systems. The following are sites which are preserving the past. Some of these links are to wikipedia and should be replaced with link to something that tells the story and significance of these systems more effectively. I think it’s amazing that people today can experience what computing was like in the 1970s and 1980s.

Operating Systems

• Multicians: Wonderful site providing history of Multics and clear explanation of why Multics matters. Many first. Complete and consistent OS which when first produced was “large” is much smaller that many operating systems that followed it. You can run Multics in a simulator on your own machine. Multics simulator on a Raspberry Pi is faster than the original production systems. 🙂
• Plan 9: what UNIX would be if taken to it’s logical conclusion. Amazingly powerful and compact. Plan 9 was designed to be used in a distributed environment.
• KeyKOS a secure capability based system. Nice memorial for Norm Hardys

Programming Environments (way more than just a programming languages)

• Smalltalk: amazing, paradigm shattering. See the Smalltalk Zoo for history and some early artifacts you can interact with.
• Interlisp-D: lovely and rich version of lisp. a revival project to get it running natively on modern systems. It’s possible to run the historical code on emulators… but why bother 🙂

Hardware Emulators (and software for them)

• SimH
• open-simh
• PCjs
• infinitemac
• Seth Morabito emulator projects, most notably for me the Xerox Alto simulator
• living computer museum @github
• emutopia

Archive Sites

• Bitsaver
• archive.org software repository
• software preservation group part of the computer history museum
  • computerhistory.org xerox_alto_file_system_archive
• macintoshrepository.org

Videos

• Mother of All Demos
• ARPA & PARC Culture
• Alan Key Tribute to Ted Nelson (with a demo of Smalltalk 76)

Related

• Classic Systems Papers