I've built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of

TL;DR: A developer has released the world's first multi-platform interactive operating system virtual museum — the Virtual OS Museum. It contains over 1,700 virtual machine installations, covering more than 250 platforms and nearly 600 different operating systems, ranging from the 1948 Manchester Baby to modern systems, and provides an easily accessible graphical launcher and snapshot restore functionality. ## Introduction to the Virtual OS Museum Today, I am releasing the **Virtual OS Museum**, the world's first multi-platform interactive virtual museum of operating systems and standalone applications, implemented as Linux virtual machines. I have put a lot of effort into making it easily accessible. As you can see, I have written a cross-emulator graphical launcher that allows you to search guest installations by name and many other attributes. ## Two Decades of Collection This is the result of over 20 years of collecting emulators and virtual machine images. The project includes: - **Over 1,700 virtual machine installations** - **Covering more than 250 platforms** - **Representing nearly 600 different operating systems** For example: - The first operating system, Scheme A - CTSS, the ancestor of all modern operating systems - Early Unix versions - Windows 1.04 - Yggdrasil (one of the earliest full-featured Linux distributions) - Nearly every well-known operating system and platform (and many obscure ones) are included in some form, spanning the entire history of stored-program computing from the **1948 Manchester Baby** to the present day. ## Pre-installed Systems and Snapshot Features All systems are pre-installed and pre-configured. The launcher also provides quick access to included documentation, including READMEs that explain potentially non-intuitive aspects. It also features **snapshot functionality**, allowing you to roll back to a known good state if a system becomes corrupted. For example, I could delete `init` and `shell` from Yggdrasil to make it unbootable, but I can instantly fix it by going to the snapshot tab, clicking the "Restore machine to snapshot" button, and restoring to the initial snapshot created when the VM was added. ## Addressing Accessibility in Software Preservation Although software preservation has improved over the past two decades, with many archive websites established and emulators for obscure platforms written, many of these projects are not easy to access: emulators and operating systems often require complex setup, and emulator regressions can cause certain operating systems to fail on later versions. This project aims to **make historically preserved materials as accessible as possible** from around the world. ## Lightweight Version and Download For users who do not want to download the full version (currently about 170 GB), there is also a **lightweight version (only about 20 GB)** that includes only the base Linux system, emulators, and the launcher. Guest VMs are downloaded on first run, so there is no need to include everything in the initial download. ## Current Testing Status and Future Plans Currently, although I have tried to test at least one guest installation for each emulator in the OS Museum VMs, and all guests have been verified to work on my machine in the past, testing of all guest installations within the OS Museum VMs is still ongoing. I will continue adding VMs to this project; I still have enough installation images to easily reach **more than 2,000 VMs**. This will also include fixing or improving emulators to run various operating systems that are currently not emulable. I will post videos in this channel about restoring currently non-emulable operating systems, as well as tours of installed operating systems; if you are interested, please subscribe to this channel. The first content will be about **Coherent on the cancelled Commodore 900 workstation**; I will try to make a video on this in the coming weeks. I will post frequently, but cannot guarantee a fixed schedule. ## Community and Support I also have a Discord server where you can discuss my projects, content, and your own personal projects. Contributions of new software additions, fixes, or new features and improvements to the launcher are welcome. If you would like to provide financial support, I have a Patreon page; becoming a patron gives you early, ad-free access to videos, and depending on the tier, priority for suggesting new operating systems and content, as well as credits in videos and the OS Museum CREDITS file. If you prefer a one-time donation, I also have a Ko-fi link. For various reasons, despite my technical skills, I have had difficulty finding a job, so any support is deeply appreciated. The Virtual OS Museum website and other social media links are in the video description. ## Source YouTube video: I've built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqcuqWTxTNw)