A virtual museum runs 570 operating systems in your browser

Andrew Warkentin has spent over twenty years collecting old operating systems and getting them to run. The result is the Virtual OS Museum, a launcher and Linux VM that boots 570-odd operating systems on top of QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM, with everything pre-installed, pre-configured, and rolled back to a known-good state by a snapshot tool when an install breaks.

The catalog covers 1,700 installs across 250 platforms. It starts in 1948 with the Manchester Baby, the machine generally credited as the first stored-program computer, and ends with early Longhorn betas and Mac OS X 10.5 on PowerPC. Along the way: CTSS, the ancestor of every modern OS; the earliest Unix; the Xerox Star, whose Pilot/ViewPoint software invented the desktop metaphor; ZetaLisp; Plan 9; classic BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum and MSX builds; PalmOS; Newton OS; and a lot of obscure mainframe environments.

Warkentin's argument for the project is that software preservation has improved significantly since 2003. Some OSes only run on a specific version of an emulator because later versions regressed. Some need patched emulators just to boot on a modern Linux box. Some take a week to install from original tape images.

Previously:

• Legendary emulator ZSNES rewritten from scratch
• 50-year-old operating system ported to 30-year-old digital typewriter
• The Retro Web archives old hardware and the drivers you need to make it happy again