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Looking for a 286 operating system

I got myself a 286. A small tower PC made from collected parts from here and there, a clock display and turbo button, but a motherboard that doesn't seem to have a turbo mode. An MFM hard drive, Mitsumi CD-ROM drive, two floppy drives, a VGA card, IO card, a damaged case. It looks like I could have built it from parts I found here and there. I reckon that's how it was built. It's the first working 286 that I had since I so stupidly through out my IBM PS/2 Model 30. Well, it wasn't that stupid at the time. It was a conscious decision. But anyway. The only other time I had a 286 board was when somebody gifted me their old PC because it was both worthless and broken. The CMOS battery had leaked and I didn't know enough about electronics to make it work, had nobody to ask and internet wasn't really a thing back then.

I had been looking for a specific model before: A Peacock 286 desktop. But Not only didn't I find one for sale so far, I'm pretty sure it would cost more than I'd be willing to pay for a vintage PC just so I could own the same PC model that was the first computer I ever used (for homw work in first grade). The first computer I had contact with was an Olympia People. I didn't even look for one of these because it would be a serious collector's piece and be respectively priced.

So I got just any working 286 PC; just to fill the gap in what I therefore should now start to call my collection of vintage hardware. It just happened to be one with a working MFM hard disk. As if I didn't already have enough unfinished and unstarted projects now I even payed money to buy me another one. Because now I have to do something with this machine, obviously. I bought it weeks ago and it's getting bored.

I thought about what OS I might want it to run. MS DOS would be the obvious choice. Too obvious for my taste. CP/M after that. But that's too similar. I want something different. But I don't even know what other systems exist that run on a 286. Linux should be out. (Although I haven't yet looked if somebody has made some part of the kernal work on a 286. I doubt it though. No extended mode, no multitasking.) IBM AIX wasn't available for the 286 models either. Are there other Unix clones or versions that run on a 286? Of course there are. I just don't know them. Prologue comes to mind. And Xenix. What others are there? Which one should I try? I could test MikeOS on it.

My Atrocities to Vintage Hardware and Software

I've thrown away a lot of stuff over the time that I mourn now. This is just to say: I'm sorry!

I feel bad when I think back and remember some things that I had collected, didn't value back then, but miss now. I had a lot of computer hardware that wasn't worth anything at the time. (Like 386 and 486 stuff in the 2000s.) I'd love to play with some of the stuff today sometimes. I think it was a waste to throw them out knowing that nobody will ever use them again. There was also an IBM PS/1 in good condition. That would be a very nice thing to own for a retro computer fan today. (It already was back then.) I also had years worth of c't magazines that I had a subscription for for a while. I had my reasons. I didn't have room to store so much stuff. But still. Maybe I could have kept just a few more things.

Even worse is that I've thrown away quite a few floppy disks with very rare software. The things I wrote back then are one thing. Nobody has a copy of these programmes I'm sure. The collection of Prologue OS software is another. Prologue was a French UNIX-like (yes, I said UNIX-like) OS for industrial applications. As far as I know there is no successor in development or still supported. It's a piece of computer history that, due to the relatively small regional spread, is not at the forefront of vintage software archives. In fact I've never seen any software for Prologue nor a version of the OS itself anywhere on the internet. The collection contained multiple versions of the OS from I don't know how long of a time span and a range of applications. The source code for many applications was also there (because of a familial connection to the author). At least some of the floppies likely contained the last copy in existence of software that was once very important in the daily work of some people.

I'm sorry!