An innovative project has been launched to create a virtual museum showcasing over 570 operating systems. This virtual museum consists of a collection of more than 1,700 virtual machines, covering over 250 platforms and 570 operating systems. The museum is designed as a virtual machine image with Linux, emulators, and a user-friendly graphical interface for easy navigation through the vast collection. Users have the unique opportunity to interact with each operating system in real-time by launching it in an emulator. The project’s creator has been collecting these emulators since 2003.
There are two versions of the virtual museum available for download: a full version (121 GB zip) with the entire collection of virtual machines and a stripped-down version (14G) containing essential components like Linux, emulators, and a graphical application for loading selected operating system images. The museum supports loading virtual machines into QEMU, VirtualBox, and UTM.
All components in the collection are pre-configured and ready for use. The virtual museum allows users to revert operating systems to their original state to restore functionality in case of system damage. The graphical application, scripts, and metadata are distributed under the CC-BY-NC-SA license, permitting non-commercial use.
The museum features operating systems dating back to 1948, including early systems like the Manchester Baby, Scheme A, IBM IBSYS, Multics, various versions of Unix, early Windows OS releases, Apple Lisa OS, Android prototypes, Linux distributions from the 1990s and 2000s, and many more. Enthusiasts can also explore operating systems for mainframes, pocket PCs, workstations, and graphical user interfaces.