{"id":626236,"date":"2026-06-07T16:33:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T16:33:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/626236\/"},"modified":"2026-06-07T16:33:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T16:33:16","slug":"the-virtual-os-museum-lets-you-relive-over-600-operating-systems-right-on-your-desktop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/626236\/","title":{"rendered":"The Virtual OS Museum lets you relive over 600 operating systems right on your desktop"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1044qizi _18mzr4b1 _18mzr4b0 _19wv7tc1\">The <a href=\"https:\/\/virtualosmuseum.org\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Virtual OS Museum<\/a> isn\u2019t a physical place, it\u2019s a collection of over <a href=\"https:\/\/virtualosmuseum.org\/installation-list\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">1,700 distinct installations<\/a> of over 600 operating systems for over 250 platforms that you can download and run via emulation right on your computer. It\u2019s largely the work of one man, <a href=\"https:\/\/virtualosmuseum.org\/about-the-curator\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Andrew Warkentin<\/a>, a developer and OS historian who has been slowly building his collection of OS images since 2003.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1044qizi _18mzr4b1 _18mzr4b0 _19wv7tc1\">The library spans nearly the entire history of computing from 1948\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Manchester_Baby\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Manchester Baby<\/a>, the first stored computer program, to early builds of Android from 2011. Unsurprisingly, there are <a href=\"https:\/\/virtualosmuseum.org\/readme\/#whats-included\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">a lot of obscure OSes<\/a> in there, including countless DOS variants, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Acorn_MOS\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">MOS<\/a> for the Acorn BBC Master, and a number of hobby OSes like <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/n6il\/nitros9\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">NitrOS-9<\/a>, which brings a host of modern features to the \u201880s Tandy Radio Shack CoCo line.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1044qizi _18mzr4b1 _18mzr4b0 _19wv7tc1\">The images generally aren\u2019t packaged with software beyond what would have come included with the OS (think calculators, file managers, and text editors), so they\u2019re somewhat limited out of the box, and getting your hands on programs for CTSS might prove difficult. But if you want to relive the glory days of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.xda-developers.com\/virtual-os-museum-reminded-how-windows-95-changed-computing-forever\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Windows 95<\/a>, this is a solid bet.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1044qizi _18mzr4b1 _18mzr4b0 _19wv7tc1\">Just be warned, the Virtual OS Museum is a sizable <a href=\"https:\/\/virtualosmuseum.org\/downloads\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">download<\/a>. The full version with all the images included is 127GB when zipped. Even the Lite edition, which downloads images as needed, weighs in at 14GB.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Virtual OS Museum isn\u2019t a physical place, it\u2019s a collection of over 1,700 distinct installations of over&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":626237,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[59,50,227,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-626236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-gb","tag-news","tag-tech","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}