Digital UNIX Resurrected

[TambayBlues]

This is another OS time travel post but this time back to 1998. I did some digging around to resurrect the legendary Digital UNIX 4.0E which like OpenVMS was also developed by DEC. You might notice the Compaq logo on the browser screenshots that's because DEC was eventually bought out according to it's history. Just like OpenVMS, it originally ran only on the DEC Alpha / AXP platform but thanks to the FreeAXP emulator we can take this OS out for a spin again without the actual hardware. I was able to install only the base OS plus some optional mediasets from the Associated Products Volume 1 coz I ran out of disk space to add the rest and Volume 2 but it still runs just the same. See the screenshots below and finally the DL link to the test run video in MP4 at the end.

Screenshots:
NOTE: GUI running is Common Desktop Environment or CDE v1.0.







Link:
Digital UNIX 4.0E Test Run Video (MP4)
https://www.mediafire.com/file/ki5tsmh1r5nuiw1/Digital+UNIX+Resurrected.rar/file

 

[TambayBlues]

Ba may 1k views na pala tong thread ko. Di lang pala ko tumatanda ng paurong dito. Well, anyway dahil sa pagtangkilik ninyong mga retro-maniacs na tulad ko may pahabol akong bonus sa inyo.

I reinstalled my emulator in a Windows XP VM running in VMWare Workstation to boost the emulation speed and was able to find a workaround to enable Netscape Communicator 4.05 to browse the modern web. Not all websites and their modern features are accessible but still it's a wonderful though somewhat strange feeling having to visit them using an almost 3 decade old browser. Check out nyo na lang tong mga sample screenshots. I'll try to post some more little by little.




Just in case anyone's wondering the website videos that you see here which are embedded or linked in a normal website are just static raster images rendered either in GIF or PNG in this case and will not play when clicked but rather refresh and change their appearance depending on how the frame is captured by WRP. Here's a few more samples but in full screen;