A massive compilation of historic OSes and the emulators to run them
The Virtual OS Museum is an epic collection of historically significant operating systems, representing more than 600 OSes across upwards of 250 platforms. It’s all local, so you’ll need a good few gigs of space.
The Virtual OS Museum is a giant mixtape for enthusiasts of the history of OS evolution. As an indication of its breadth of coverage, it reaches all the way back to the Manchester Baby – from 1948. Multics, the Xerox Alto, NeXTstep, PowerPC Mac OS X, early versions of Windows NT and Android, and more.
It is one hefty layer-cake of code. The project offers two versions to download. The Full edition is a whopping 121 GB download, which unpacks to 174 GB, but includes everything ready for offline use. If that’s a little indigestible, there’s also a “Lite” edition which includes the various emulators, but not the all the disk and tape images of actual vintage OSes: those are downloaded and run on first use. This is a mere 14 GB download, which expands to 21 GB of space.
REG AD
The download contains an x86 Linux VM, and inside that are the various emulators, which are listed on the Credits page. The VM should run on most things: the README has instructions for launching it on Linux, and on both macOS and Windows on both x86-64 and Arm64. On Linux and Windows it runs inside VirtualBox, and on macOS inside QEMU. Either way, the package will install and configure the hypervisor for you if needed – including adding itself to an existing copy, if you already have it installed.
REG AD
There’s a lot in here: the homepage has a section with 45 screenshots and there’s a second page with over 100 more.
This means that its licensing is a little complicated. The launcher and its configuration is distributed under the MAME license, which keeps source code available but prohibits commercial use. The metadata of the various OSes is distributed under the CC-BY-NC-SA license. As for the many OSes themselves, the license page merely says:
Everything else retains its original license. Any commercial software in this collection is included for purposes of historical research and preservation only
Everything else retains its original license. Any commercial software in this collection is included for purposes of historical research and preservation only
This is followed by a note that nothing in the compilation is still available for retail sale anywhere, and a request for copyright holders to contact the author if they want anything removed.
That author is Canadian developer Andrew Warkentin, who also has a blog called Andrew’s OS Lab, plus a Gitlab instance, holding the project’s scripts, config and website, and for his unfinished RTOS UX/RT.
It’s an impressive assembly. Although this vulture suspects that he’s already tried quite a few of the contents, this is a vastly larger collection than we’ve ever assembled. Part of the value here is that it contains snapshots of various important steps in the evolution of modern computers – including things outside of the main sequence. So many such emulators exist because somebody somewhere got curious and went looking for some relics of code gone by and built tools to run it – but to do that, you need to know that it existed.
If you don’t already know, then this browsable catalog of OSes running via emulation is your illustrated and interactive guide. It’s way more interesting to play with these old systems than just watch videos, and at least for us, it’s more interesting to run it on your own computer than inside an web page.
We’ve also personally failed fairly hard at getting some ancient mainframe OSes running, because the meager available documentation assumes that if you’re interested enough to want to try something, that means that you already know about it. When it comes to very early mainframes, for example, the Reg FOSS desk definitely doesn’t – even though our knowledge reaches back to the early 1980s. On that note, we also like Warkentin's mention that if you break the emulated system, then there is a button to restore to a working snapshot.
REG AD
In his introductory video, he says that it’s a work-in-progress and he has enough additional candidates yet to add to push the collection to over 2,000 different entries. An updater is included, so you won’t have to re-download the whole thing. He also, slightly disarmingly, does admit that not every single one has been tested yet, and that he’s publishing it partly in the hopes of finding employment.
We wish him luck. ®