You can now telnet straight into 28 different classic machines in your browser, thanks to a collaboration between the Interim Computer Museum and SDF.org.
The project exposes a whole grid of live remote systems, all reachable via web terminal or a regular telnet client, with each one mapped to a specific historical machine and OS. You’ve got everything from DEC PDP‑11s running Unix V7 and 2.11BSD, to a Honeywell 6180 running Multics, IBM mainframes on VM/SP, CDC‑6500 with NOS, AT&T 3B2 hardware, and VAX boxes on 4.3BSD, Ultrix, and OpenVMS. These aren’t themed emulators with cartoon UIs; they’re real multi‑user systems, hosted and maintained as a living museum.
Once you’re in, you can explore period‑correct shells, compilers, editors, and even classic games like Rogue, Adventure, NetHack, Tetris, Wanderer, and various Trek variants, each running on the kind of hardware they were actually written for. SDF also layers in tutorials and docs, so if you’ve never touched TOPS‑20, ITS, or Multics before, you’re not just dropped into a blinking cursor with no map.
On the surface, this sounds like deep‑cut retro‑computing nerdery, but it overlaps nicely with all the obsession over accuracy in emulation and FPGA recreations. Actually sitting at a simulated PDP‑11 or VAX and running the tools of the time gives context to why modern systems and languages look the way they do, in a way that a themed front‑end or a MiSTer core just doesn’t. It’s also a fun reminder that “cloud gaming” isn’t new at all. People were effectively time‑sharing remote machines and playing games over serial lines decades before Stadia failed in 4K.
With how often we argue about scanlines and cycle‑accuracy, being able to hop into actual historical computing environments for free in a browser feels like a cheat code for anyone who cares about where all this stuff came from.
Source: Interim Computer Museum via Tom’s Hardware
