Andrew Warkentin's Virtual OS Museum Collects 174GB of Ready-to-Use Vintage Operating Systems

Developer and vintage computing historian Andrew Warkentin has released the most exhaustive collection of operating systems you could imagine, all ready to run in a virtual machine: the Virtual OS Museum.

"I am (finally) releasing the Virtual OS Museum, which is the world's first multi-platform interactive virtual museum of operating systems and standalone applications, implemented as a Linux VM [Virtual Machine]," Warkentin explains of the impressive undertaking. "Nearly all well-known OSes and platforms (and many obscure ones) are included in some form, spanning the entire history of stored-program computing from the 1948 Manchester Baby to the present day. This is the result of over 20 years of collecting emulators and VM images; over 1700 VM installations are included, across over 250 platforms, representing nearly 600 distinct OSes."

While plenty of effort has been put into preserving classic games and software packages, less thought is usually given to the operating systems on which they ran. Still less focus has been put on making software preservation archives accessible even to less-technical users: "emulators and OSes often requiring complex setup," Warkentin explains, "and regressions in emulators breaking certain OSes in later versions."

The Virtual OS Museum is Warkentin's answer to that: around 174GB of operating system images, configured to be ready-to-run: just pick what you'd like to see from a graphical menu and you'll be transported back in time to anything from early versions of Microsoft's Windows to the Apple LisaOS — or even, as Warkentin highlights, software designed for the Manchester Baby, one of the first stored-program computers.

"The catalogue covers," its curator says, "among many other things: the earliest mainframes: Manchester Baby test/demo programs, Mark 1 Scheme A/B/C/T (the earliest examples of system software that could be considered as an OS), various EDSAC software, etc; later mainframes and minicomputers: CTSS, MVS, VM/370, TOPS-10/20, ITS, Multics, RSX, RSTS, and more; workstations and Unix variants: PERQ OSes, SunOS, IRIX, OSF/1, A/UX, NeXTSTEP, Plan 9, various BSDs, plus Linux distributions across the decades, and more.

"Home computers: various CP/M variants, Apple II, Commodore 8-bit machines, Atari 8-bit, MSX, Tandy TRS-80, BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, Sharp MZ, and more; personal computer operating systems: various DOS variants, OS/2, BeOS, Windows from 1.0 to early Longhorn betas, classic Mac OS through Mac OS X 10.5 PPC, and more; mobile and embedded: PalmOS, EPOC/Symbian, Windows CE, Newton OS, early Android and iOS where emulation permits, QNX, etc.; research and obscure systems: ZetaLisp, Smalltalk environments, Oberon, Plan 9, and many more that few people now have ever booted."

Interested parties can find out more and download their own copy of the museum on the official website; if you can't spare 174GB of disk space right now, a "Lite" version requires only 21GB and downloads missing files on-demand as you load up particular operating systems. "If a working version of an operating system exists somewhere, the goal is to have it here," Wartenkin says of future updates, "in a form anyone can run on a reasonably modern laptop/desktop."