A virtual museum runs 570 operating systems in your browser
The Virtual OS Museum, created by Andrew Warkentin, showcases 570 operating systems that can be run directly in a web browser. This extensive collection spans from the first stored-program computer in 1948 to early versions of modern operating systems. The project emphasizes the importance of software preservation and the challenges associated with running older operating systems on contemporary hardware.
- ▪The museum features 570 operating systems running on QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM.
- ▪It includes a catalog of 1,700 installs across 250 platforms, starting from 1948.
- ▪Andrew Warkentin argues that software preservation has improved since 2003, but challenges remain for running older OSes.
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A virtual museum runs 570 operating systems in your browser Ellsworth Toohey 5:34 pm Wed May 20, 2026 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.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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