To Milwaukee?

We would have come up with lots of ways to make Steam. Electricity still would have happened. So I am guessing a lot of steam generating electricity. Hydro power would still be a thing as would thermal.

Wind power seems like the real candidate for early supremacy though. It can be purely mechanical ( eg. Grinding or running pumps ), it could store energy in the form of water pressure, and it could be used to generate electricity.

If we had a reliable electrical grid and no fossil fuels, things like batteries and electric cars would have gotten a lot further ahead sooner.

A smaller Industrial Revolution was totally possible on wind and water power. The next step would be electricity. Once we had electricity, a lot of the road we went down would be possible. Nuclear power would probably have been added to the mix more or less on the same schedule.

Perhaps the biggest deference would not be energy but rather plastics. It is hard to say what the materials side of history would have looked like without oil.

I just said this above but this desktop is still available. It is called The Trinity Desktop now.

https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

https://q4os.org/

You can still use old KDE. It is called Trinity now. It is a pretty decent desktop if you have an older machine.

I just noticed that, in the screenshot, it is running in 86box. So, you know for sure it works there and 86box works great on modern machines ( Windows, Mac, and Linux ).

https://86box.net/

Confirmed. The minimum requirements are a 386 with 8 MB of RAM and 100 MB of drive space. Incredible.

It should work fine in a virtual machine. Just make sure you provide suitably ancient hardware like IDE storage and old ethernet cards. On something that old, I would only provide a single CPU. To be safe, I would also try installing with a low amount of RAM and then increase it later. Older kernels could not handle multi-processor or RAM above a certain size. I think I might start with 700 MB of RAM to do the install. That might sound like nothing but it probably runs in 8.

It is easy today in our era of resource richness to forget just how meager the hardware was when these distros were new.

A distro that old is going to require some fiddling to get XFree86 ( x11 ) up and running. It should be ok in a desktop VM but I have had problems with older versions of X in Proxmox in case you are using that.

I kind of want to go install this myself now. Or an old version of SLS ( pre-cursor to Slackware ). I ran them both at some point in my Linux journey but it has been a while.

What I really want to do is to make OCI containers from these old distros and try to run them in Distrobox on top of a modern kernel. Has somebody done that already? Really old versions of Red Hat ( not RHEL, Red Hat, < 6 ) would be cool too.

Yes

The Motif look, what we are looking at here, is driven by the same UI guidelines that early Windows and OS/2 followed. You will notice a lot of similarity between them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

If it was a real UNIX workstation, you were almost certainly using CDE ( Common Desktop Environment ).

https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/Home/

https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

Looks like FVWM2.

I just learned that OpenBSD still defaults to that look.