OK, every operating system is a bit of a stretch — Windows Vista notably didn’t make the cut — but [Andrew]’s Virtual OS museum has a good claim to being the most comprehensive archive of operating systems yet assembled.
[Andrew] has a blog post describing the project, as well as a YouTube video that we’ve embedded below. But the real fun is in the downloading and spinning up one of 570+ operating systems for more than 250 platforms on pre-configured virtual machines that have been packaged up for us.
This isn’t just the usual retrocomputer nostalgia-fest of Macintosh System and DOSBox. There’s everything from IBM Big Iron and VAXen to Texas Instrument graphing calculators emulated in the museum, with software to run on them, too. If you’ve ever wondered what you could do with the Manchester Baby, well, all known software for that machine is included with its ‘operating system’.
Admission is free, but like any good museum you’ll be waiting in line a while to get in, so expect the full 128 GB download to take some time. If you’re into computer history, though, it’s going to very much be worth the wait. If you try it and like it, you could help others by seeding the torrent.
The actual museum launches in a VM as a modern Linux system — perhaps that can be considered an exhibit itself — with a launcher to select any of the other system/OS combos, including various other, older Linuxes hosted on their own VMs. There are more to come, too, as [Andrew] continues the long debugging process of making sure everything works as expected.
Purists may decry this virtual emulation as not being quite the real thing, which is true. But while MiSTer supports a lot of cores via FPGA, you probably won’t find everything here on that platform. We have, however, seen an FPGA recreation of the Manchester Baby. More than once, even.
Continue reading “Virtual Museum Hosts Every OS You Haven’t Heard Of”
