Virtual OS Museum bundles emulated operating systems from 1948 to today

A one-person preservation project has packaged a vast catalog of operating systems into a single Linux VM that runs under QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM, with a custom launcher that hides emulator-specific quirks behind a click-and-run interface. The collection spans from Manchester Baby demo programs and early mainframe monitors through CTSS, Multics, and TOPS-20, into Unix workstations, home computers like the BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum, desktop systems from CP/M and OS/2 to Mac OS X 10.5 PPC and early Longhorn betas, and mobile platforms including PalmOS, Symbian, and Newton OS. Snapshots let users break installations without consequence, and a lite edition fetches disk images on demand instead of shipping the full archive.

The maintainer frames the effort as a response to a gap in existing preservation work: images and emulators exist for almost everything, but assembling a working installation often takes hours or days, requires specific emulator versions to avoid regressions, and depends on host quirks. Some entries in the museum took nearly a week to install, and several emulators were patched to keep older guests bootable on modern Linux. Where possible, machines come preloaded with era-appropriate applications so the experience approximates how the system was actually used.

The project has been accumulating since 2003 and is still expanding, with support channels on Patreon, Ko-fi, Discord, and GitLab for bug reports against the launcher. It’s a notable contribution to computing history that turns previously theoretical bootability into something a curious user can actually run on a laptop.