About this lab
This is a companion to the Vintage Computing Museum. The museum lets you read about the machines; the lab lets you use them. Pick a system, click start, and a real vintage operating system or program boots right in the page.
How it works
Everything runs client-side. The emulator — js-dos (a WebAssembly build of DOSBox) for DOS software, and v86 for full graphical operating systems — executes inside your own browser. No virtual machine is running on a server somewhere; your laptop is doing the emulating. That keeps the site cheap to host, safe, and able to handle any number of visitors at once.
Why only some systems
Every system offered here is either open-source or has been explicitly released as free-to-redistribute shareware or freeware. That's a deliberate choice: it keeps the whole project on clean legal ground. It's also why you'll see FreeDOS standing in for MS-DOS, and KolibriOS and Tiny Core Linux standing in for the Windows and Mac systems of their eras — the originals are still under copyright, so we show a legally-clean equivalent of the same experience instead.
Licenses & sources
Each system's own page links its license and the source the disk image came from. If you believe something here is mislicensed or shouldn't be distributed, please get in touch and it'll come down.