The Virtual OS Museum lets you relive over 600 operating systems right on your desktop

Jun 07, 2026 09:17 PM - 3 hours ago 87

Terrence O'Brien

is the Verge’s play editor. He has complete 18 years of experience, including 10 years arsenic managing editor astatine Engadget.

The Virtual OS Museum isn’t a beingness place, it’s a postulation of complete 1,700 chopped installations of complete 600 operating systems for complete 250 platforms that you tin download and tally via emulation correct connected your computer. It’s mostly the activity of 1 man, Andrew Warkentin, a developer and OS historiographer who has been slow building his postulation of OS images since 2003.

The room spans astir the full history of computing from 1948’s Manchester Baby, the first stored machine program, to early builds of Android from 2011. Unsurprisingly, location are a batch of obscure OSes successful there, including countless DOS variants, MOS for the Acorn BBC Master, and a number of hobby OSes for illustration NitrOS-9, which brings a big of modern features to the ‘80s Tandy Radio Shack CoCo line.

The images mostly aren’t packaged pinch package beyond what would person travel included pinch the OS (think calculators, record managers, and matter editors), truthful they’re somewhat constricted retired of the box, and getting your hands connected programs for CTSS mightiness beryllium difficult. But if you want to relive the glory days of Windows 95, this is simply a coagulated bet.

Just beryllium warned, the Virtual OS Museum is simply a sizable download. The afloat type pinch each the images included is 127GB erstwhile zipped. Even the Lite edition, which downloads images arsenic needed, weighs successful astatine 14GB.

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