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One PC, Six Hard Drives, 37 OSes!
This rig doesn’t have Plexiglas portals or sport a fancy-pants paint job, but behind its plain-Jane exterior are no fewer than 37 operating systems! Make that 53 if you count the DOS window managers.
The rig’s audacious architect is 18-year-old Richard Robbins—an Eagle Scout, all-state jazz drummer, and tireless OS enthusiast who drove with parental units and PC all the way from Southern Utah to our offices in Brisbane, CA just so we could verify the authenticity of his creation. Is this guy nuts? No. But he does confess that he launched the Menagerie project specifically because an online computer expert said it couldn’t be done.
All the OSes are loaded onto six hard drives, and divvied across five separate boot menus with the help of a freely distributed bootloader called XOSL. The Menagerie features four 5400rpm Maxtors, one 7200rpm Maxtor, and one 7200rpm Western Digital. The rig’s Gigabite GA6VXE7+ motherboard, 1GHz P-III, Promise PCI IDE ATA/100 controller, and ATI Rage 128 graphics were surprisingly OS-friendly. A 350-watt PSU powers everything.
When challenging Richard to successfully load any OS our little hearts desired, we were amazed at the variety—and antiquity—of what he managed to boot. It was nice to see BeOS (sublime, efficient), OS/2 Warp IV (vexingly quaint), and a bunch of Linux distributions (rebellious and defiant), but we were most charmed by Windows 1.01, which was just a few pixels away from looking like a basic DOS screen.
The rig’s audacious architect is 18-year-old Richard Robbins—an Eagle Scout, all-state jazz drummer, and tireless OS enthusiast who drove with parental units and PC all the way from Southern Utah to our offices in Brisbane, CA just so we could verify the authenticity of his creation. Is this guy nuts? No. But he does confess that he launched the Menagerie project specifically because an online computer expert said it couldn’t be done.
All the OSes are loaded onto six hard drives, and divvied across five separate boot menus with the help of a freely distributed bootloader called XOSL. The Menagerie features four 5400rpm Maxtors, one 7200rpm Maxtor, and one 7200rpm Western Digital. The rig’s Gigabite GA6VXE7+ motherboard, 1GHz P-III, Promise PCI IDE ATA/100 controller, and ATI Rage 128 graphics were surprisingly OS-friendly. A 350-watt PSU powers everything.
When challenging Richard to successfully load any OS our little hearts desired, we were amazed at the variety—and antiquity—of what he managed to boot. It was nice to see BeOS (sublime, efficient), OS/2 Warp IV (vexingly quaint), and a bunch of Linux distributions (rebellious and defiant), but we were most charmed by Windows 1.01, which was just a few pixels away from looking like a basic DOS screen.
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