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A virtual museum runs 570 operating systems in your browser [1]

['Ellsworth Toohey']

Date: 2026-05-20  

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.

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