Blog/2025-01-06/Athene OS

Back in the day, I was the kind of teen common in the late '90s / early millennium who installed a bunch of Linux distros and looked at all the configuration options in all the menus available there. Apart from the usual drama of deleting one's parents' presentations without backups and so on, I did manage to try a bunch of fun things which history has now forgotten.

Back in the day there was this operating system plus graphics toolkit called Athene OS. The thing I most recall about this is that the SciTech SNAP graphics driver architecture it used was actually genuinely snappy. It was the lowest-latency desktop operating system I'd used until then. And if I recall correctly, it was all in software. The hardware I was using back then was a Via-based x86-compatible machine that had the Via Unichrome integrated graphics processor. This was, as you can guess, mostly far behind the state of the art of the time. But because of some kind people who had worked on the OpenChrome project, it worked quite well under Linux and icculus's port of Unreal Tournament (for which I'd somehow nabbed a CD) worked better on Linux than on Windows! Anyway, there was no hardware acceleration on Athene OS as a result of this being an esoteric video device. Therefore, I couldn't watch any video (so I used aalib or similar to watch some in ASCII using mplayer).

A few months ago, I remembered this particular OS and the urge to go check it out again gripped me. My memory of it is slightly different from the screenshots available now. The Athene Desktop Edition is available readily on the Internet since it was free and available on Tucows (who donated the file and listing to the Internet Archive) but it's not what I want. This is because the desktop edition installed on a Linux (or Windows) of the time and gave you a desktop environment. If I recall correctly, it was actually a bit different from the standalone operating system, which is where the real magic was.

Well, I was hoping that perhaps the original proprietor of Rocklyte, Paul Manias, would have a copy, but despite everything I was unable to get a letter to him. There are lots of references to the OS on the Internet on obscure forums (and Reddit from 2009) but the actual ISO seems lost to time.

One thing about the UK is that Companies House keeps information about every company and Rocklyte is still an extant company as of 2025 - Paul Manias is still a director and he pays the dues to keep it running. The address for the company does not work, though. The mail was returned as undeliverable despite being addressed to Paul Manias at Rocklyte.

Back in the day, Eugenia Loli ran osnews.com and she had this interview with Paul Manias. She's still available easily on the Internet. I contacted her via Reddit DM and unfortunately for me she had no information.

Hi, thank you for the msg. Unfortunately I don't have any info on him anymore, and their website is now defunct. But there's always the way back machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20050301000000*/http://www.rocklyte.com/

— Eugenia Loli, Reddit DM to /u/eugenia_loli

Anyway, at that point, my desire to trace him down and get a copy of the software faded. As far as I know Rocklyte and Paul Manias are located in the UK or New Zealand, and the business address they list on Companies House does not accept mail to the company. Companies House stopped listing Directors' addresses some time in the last ten years as part of privacy changes and so the trail has run cold as far as I'm concerned.

Hope that eliminates some search avenues if anyone else ever tries this.