Virtual OS Museum Lets You Boot Over 600 Retro Operating Systems

A momentous occasion in computing history has been achieved with the release of the Virtual OS Museum. A lone developer has collected over 1700 OS installs across over 250 emulated hardware platforms and 600 distinct operating systems. The emulation isn't just the original software, either. For vintage hardware with unique input devices, the interfaces have been recreated in a mouse-friendly form, giving you an idea how they were to use. The Virtual OS Museum is an all-in-one package under a single Linux VM, and is usable across various modern machines without the need to create a separate partition from your main OS. The history at your fingertips ranges from the usual suspects of early DOS and Apple systems, all the way to 1948's Manchester Baby, the first stored-program computer and the precursor to the very concept of an operating system.


The curator behind the Virtual OS Museum is Andrew Warkentin of Andrew's OS Lab, with the Museum encompassing twenty years of archival work on his part  In that sense, it could be considered his magnum opus as an archivist, with a full install requiring around 174 GB of storage space for the combined OS images after extraction. The lite version, which downloads individual system images on demand, starts at 21 GB of storage required post-extraction. The all-encompassing nature of the Virtual OS Museum is truly staggering, ranging from early mainframes and workstations to mini computers and even obscure research-only systems.

The Virtual OS Museum is a truly awe-inspiring piece of software preservation and computing history, right up there with the Computer History Museum and the Internet Archive. The latter of which should serve as a good place to find additional software for these collected OSes, should you wish to. Even if you don't plan on testing it for yourself, we highly recommend giving the related web pages a read and the extended gallery a viewing, just to see how visually-distinct the history of computing really is. For any computer historian or hardware enthusiast, the Virtual OS Museum is simply a priceless source of knowledge.