Virtual OS Museum Puts 600 Operating Systems on Your Desktop

The Virtual OS Museum holds over 1,700 pre-configured operating system installations across more than 250 platforms, covering nearly 600 distinct OSes spanning from the 1948 Manchester Baby to early Android builds, and every one runs on a modern laptop without touching a single emulator configuration. Canadian developer Andrew Warkentin assembled the collection from 2003 onward and released it publicly in May 2026, describing it as the world’s first multi-platform interactive virtual museum of operating systems.

The package is a Linux virtual machine pre-loaded with every emulator and OS image. Pick a system from a graphical menu and it boots on Windows, macOS, or Linux.

The Archive That Took 23 Years to Build

The Early Collection

The collecting started simply. He switched to Linux in the early 2000s and began pulling down whatever OS images he could find. In 2003, available online archives were small; emulators for platforms outside mainstream consumer hardware were scattered and rare.

One of his early downloads was a tape image of ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System, MIT’s AI Lab operating system from the 1960s and 1970s), retrieved over slow dial-up from a rural location. Getting some installations into a running state took days; a handful required close to a week to build from original tape media.

What 1,700 Installations Required

Each platform in the catalog needed its own emulator, configured for that specific architecture, and some have multiple versions with different compatibility profiles. Early tools for obscure hardware were often single-developer projects; some have since been abandoned, others introduced bugs in later builds that the collection had to work around.

Getting something like Multics to run, for instance, means finding an emulator that handles the Honeywell hardware Multics ran on, verifying the disk image, and working through an installation procedure that originally required dedicated teams and specialized media. The collection is described as a preliminary release, with individual VM testing still in progress. The reasoning for building it appears on the project’s documentation page:

While the state of software preservation has improved significantly over the past two decades, many of the existing software preservation projects are still not particularly accessible. When I started collecting emulator images, there were only a few small archives of software images and the corresponding documentation, and relatively few emulators for anything other than well-known consumer-oriented platforms.

Andrew Warkentin, on the Virtual OS Museum’s project documentation. The archive behind those words took 23 years to assemble. The launcher and scripts carry a non-commercial redistribution license; commercial software in the collection retains its original license, with copyright holders invited to request removal.

The Catalog Spans 78 Years

The oldest entry is software for the Manchester Baby, generally credited as the first stored-program computer, which ran its first successful program in June 1948. At the catalog’s other end sit early Android builds. Between those two points, the collection covers the full arc of the stored-program era:

• Earliest mainframes: Manchester Baby test programs, Mark 1 Scheme variants (among the earliest software qualifying as an OS), and EDSAC software
• Later mainframes and minicomputers: CTSS (the Compatible Time-Sharing System, MIT’s 1960s system that shaped modern OS design), MVS, VM/370, TOPS-10/20, ITS, Multics, RSX, and more
• Workstations and Unix variants: SunOS, IRIX, OSF/1, A/UX, NeXTSTEP, Plan 9, various BSDs, and Linux distributions from across the decades
• Home computers: CP/M variants, Apple II, Commodore 8-bit machines, Atari 8-bit, MSX, Tandy TRS-80, BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, and more
• Personal computer operating systems: DOS variants, OS/2, BeOS, Windows from 1.0 through early Longhorn betas, and classic Mac OS through Mac OS X 10.5 on PowerPC
• Mobile and embedded: PalmOS, EPOC/Symbian, Windows CE, Newton OS, early Android and iOS where emulation permits, and QNX
• Research and obscure systems: ZetaLisp, Smalltalk environments, Oberon, and others that few people outside specialist circles have ever booted

One historically significant entry: the Xerox Star Pilot/ViewPoint system, often cited as the first commercial OS with a desktop GUI, predating the Macintosh by several years. It runs in the museum alongside everything else.

How the Museum Runs

The package delivers as an x86 Linux VM, running inside QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM on the host machine. One-click launch scripts are provided for Windows, macOS, and Linux on both x86-64 and Arm64. If the machine running it doesn’t already have a hypervisor installed, the script sets one up. Once the VM boots, a custom launcher presents the full catalog; select an OS and the appropriate emulator starts it.

Two editions are available from the official downloads page. The full edition ships with everything pre-downloaded for fully offline use; the lite edition fetches individual OS images over the network the first time each one is loaded:

The launcher includes a snapshot feature that reverts a broken installation to a known-good state, useful for a collection where some older systems are fragile under emulation. New OS installations are pulled via update check, without requiring a fresh download of the full VM; both editions use the same underlying update repository so they stay current identically.

Software Preservation’s Missing Shelf

Game emulation built organized infrastructure through the 1990s and 2000s. MAME (the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) launched in 1997; the Internet Archive has offered in-browser playable software for years; console emulation communities produced tools accessible enough for casual users. Operating systems never got the same treatment.

Institutional efforts went in a different direction. The Computer History Museum’s Software Preservation Group has tracked down historically significant code since 2003, including a successful recovery of the original FORTRAN compiler. The Software Preservation Network (SPN), formed in 2016, coordinates policy, metadata standards, and tooling across university libraries, museums, and archives, with work that includes DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) exemption petitions to expand what institutions can legally do with historically significant software. Both are essential infrastructure, but their outputs are archival and research-oriented, not designed to let a curious reader boot a 1960s mainframe OS on a Tuesday afternoon.

Copyright law is its own complication here. Preservationists have spent years in federal rulemaking petitions arguing for expanded access rights; the SPN has been specifically working on DMCA exemptions for remote access to preserved non-game software through the triennial rulemaking process. The museum’s commercial software sits in the same gray zone, included under a preservation argument with a copyright holder removal right as the legal backstop.

OSnews, which covers operating systems and computing history as its primary beat, put the gap plainly when the museum launched: configurations like these “exist in the gaming world, but I’ve never seen something like this for operating systems.”

The project has one stated goal for future additions: if a working version of any OS exists somewhere, it belongs here, “in a form anyone can run on a reasonably modern laptop/desktop.”

Limits Worth Knowing

The museum ships OS images without software for them. Each system comes pre-loaded with whatever originally shipped with it: calculators, file managers, text editors, the basic system tools. Anything beyond that is the user’s project. Finding period-correct applications for historical systems ranges from manageable (CP/M software is still reasonably available online) to near-impossible (CTSS has almost nothing left in public archives). Booting Windows 95 is one click; running it the way anyone used it in 1995 requires a separate effort.

The scarcity problem runs deepest with the oldest platforms. Multics source code was preserved at MIT; documentation for systems like CTSS also survived the decades. What didn’t make it into public archives is the working software itself, the programs researchers and students actually ran on those machines in the 1960s. A system can boot in the museum without there being anything meaningful to do once it does.

Some emulations are also less stable than others. Certain OSes run only on a specific emulator version because later releases introduced compatibility regressions; others need patched emulator builds just to start on a modern Linux host. A GitLab issue tracker is open for broken installations, and the collection is described as a preliminary release with individual VM testing still ongoing.

There is a hardware ceiling for ARM users. The host VM is currently x86-only, which means every OS on Apple Silicon or any other ARM machine runs through an added software translation layer with a noticeable performance cost. The project’s README notes that a native ARM host VM is in development.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is the Virtual OS Museum?

The Virtual OS Museum is a downloadable collection of more than 1,700 pre-configured operating system installations, covering nearly 600 distinct OSes across more than 250 platforms. Built by a single Canadian developer over more than two decades, it packages every OS and its required emulator into a Linux VM that runs on QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM, so users can boot historical operating systems without configuring any emulation software themselves.

Where Can I Download the Virtual OS Museum?

The museum is available at virtualosmuseum.org, with two editions: a Full edition (121 GB zipped, expanding to 174 GB installed) that includes all OS images for offline use, and a Lite edition (14 GB zipped, expanding to 21 GB installed) that downloads individual OS images on first use. Both editions support automatic updates so new OS installations can be pulled without re-downloading the entire VM.

Which Operating Systems Are Included?

The catalog spans from 1948 mainframe software to early Android builds, with coverage including Unix variants, NeXTSTEP, Plan 9, classic Mac OS through Mac OS X 10.5 on PowerPC, Windows from 1.0 through early Longhorn betas, DOS variants, BeOS, OS/2, PalmOS, Newton OS, and many obscure research systems. The Xerox Star Pilot and ViewPoint system, often cited as the first commercial OS with a desktop GUI, is also in the catalog.

Does the Museum Include Software for Each Operating System?

No. Each OS comes pre-installed with the tools it originally shipped with, such as calculators, file managers, and text editors. Third-party applications are not bundled. For some systems, period-correct software is still findable in online archives. For older environments, almost nothing survives in publicly accessible form.

Does the Virtual OS Museum Run on Apple Silicon?

Yes, with a performance caveat. The museum runs on macOS Arm64 hardware using UTM, and quick-start scripts for Apple Silicon are included in the package. The host VM is currently x86-only, however, so all emulation on ARM hardware runs through an added software translation layer. The project’s README notes that a native ARM host VM is in development.