(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

Previously I ran a whole series of articles about vintage hypervisors and dos emulators for unix. Some of them: Merge, VP/ix, Wabi, SoftWindows, etc. Today we have a special gem: PC Simulator on AIX 3.x on POWER!

I recently virtualized AIX 3.2.5 on QEMU. While browsing Info Explorer I noticed this curiosity:

As you can imagine in 2026 this would be pretty much unobtanium relic. Fortunately Plamen, now confirmed having a time machine was able to score this:

Above is a plain text / ascii mode.

There also is X11 version!

Capable of VGA graphics!

Usage: pcsim. For X11/VGA mode: -dmode VGA. The pcsim can be launched with PC BASIC bios, or load DOS from floppy disk or HD image. For hd image: -Cdrive /usr/local/pcsim/pcdos5.img – In order to quit press ESC + type pcsim.

The pcsim tarball is here: https://files.42718.net/mirror/tenox/os/aix/3.2/pcsim-1.2-aix325-full.tar.Z