The Virtual OS Museum opens its doors

OSes

A massive compilation of historic OSes and the emulators to run them

The Virtual OS Museum is an epic collection of historically
significant operating systems, representing more than 600 OSes across upwards of 250
platforms. It’s all local, so you’ll need a good few gigs of space.

The Virtual OS Museum is a
giant mixtape for enthusiasts of the history of OS evolution. As an
indication of its breadth of coverage, it reaches all the way back to
the Manchester
Baby – from 1948. Multics, the Xerox Alto, NeXTstep, PowerPC Mac OS
X, early versions of Windows NT and Android, and more.

It is one hefty layer-cake of code. The project offers two versions to
download. The Full edition is a whopping 121 GB download,
which unpacks to 174 GB, but includes everything ready for offline use.
If that’s a little indigestible, there’s also a “Lite” edition which
includes the various emulators, but not the all the disk and tape images
of actual vintage OSes: those are downloaded and run on first use. This
is a mere 14 GB download, which expands to 21 GB of space.

The download contains an x86 Linux VM, and inside that are the
various emulators, which are listed on the Credits page. The VM
should run on most things: the README has instructions
for launching it on Linux, and on both macOS and Windows on both x86-64
and Arm64. On Linux and Windows it runs inside VirtualBox, and on macOS
inside QEMU. Either way, the package will install and configure the
hypervisor for you if needed – including adding itself to an existing
copy, if you already have it installed.

There’s a lot in here: the homepage has a section with 45
screenshots and there’s a second page with over 100
more.

This means that its licensing is a little complicated. The
launcher and its configuration is distributed under the MAME
license, which keeps source code available but prohibits commercial
use. The metadata of the various OSes is distributed under the CC-BY-NC-SA license.
As for the many OSes themselves, the license page merely says:

Everything else retains its original license. Any commercial software
in this collection is included for purposes of historical research and
preservation only

This is followed by a note that nothing in the compilation is still
available for retail sale anywhere, and a request for copyright holders to contact
the author if they want anything removed.

That author is Canadian developer Andrew
Warkentin, who also has a blog called Andrew’s OS Lab, plus a Gitlab instance, holding the
project’s scripts, config
and website, and for his unfinished RTOS UX/RT.

It’s an impressive assembly. Although this vulture suspects that he’s
already tried quite a few of the contents, this is a vastly larger
collection than we’ve ever assembled. Part of the value here is that it
contains snapshots of various important steps in the evolution of modern
computers – including things outside of the main sequence. So many such
emulators exist because somebody somewhere got curious and went looking
for some relics of code gone by and built tools to run it – but to do
that, you need to know that it existed.

If you don’t already know, then this browsable catalog of OSes running via emulation is your illustrated and interactive
guide. It’s way more interesting to play with these old systems than
just watch videos, and at least for us, it’s more interesting to run it
on your own computer than inside an web page. 

We’ve also personally
failed fairly hard at getting some ancient mainframe OSes running,
because the meager available documentation assumes that if you’re
interested enough to want to try something, that means that you already
know about it. When it comes to very early mainframes, for example, the
Reg FOSS desk definitely doesn’t – even though our knowledge
reaches back to the early 1980s. On that note, we also like Warkentin’s mention
that if you break the emulated system, then there is a button to restore
to a working snapshot.

In his introductory video, he says that it’s a
work-in-progress and he has enough additional candidates yet to add to
push the collection to over 2,000 different entries. An updater is
included, so you won’t have to re-download the whole thing. He also,
slightly disarmingly, does admit that not every single one has been
tested yet, and that he’s publishing it partly in the hopes of finding
employment. 

We wish him luck. ®