Virtual OS Museum lets you run 600 operating systems on your computer

A single Linux virtual machine now opens a sprawling archive of operating systems that once ran on mainframes, workstations, minicomputers and phones. The Virtual OS Museum packages more than 1,700 pre-installed installations, spanning more than 600 operating systems across upwards of 250 platforms, so users can boot them on Linux, Windows or macOS instead of studying them only in screenshots and write-ups.

That matters because operating systems are not just software; they are records of design decisions, hardware constraints and user habits. The collection reaches back to the Manchester Baby in 1948 and runs to the present day, preserving systems that shaped computing history such as Multics, the Xerox Alto, NeXTstep, PowerPC Mac OS X, early Windows NT and Android. It also includes standalone applications, giving researchers and curious users a way to interact with old interfaces, not just read about them.

Andrew Warkentin, a Canadian developer and OS historian, built the project largely on his own. Warkentin describes himself as an OS/emulator developer and curator of the world’s largest collection of pre-installed emulated operating systems. He is also the developer of UX/RT, an open-source QNX-like operating system, which helps explain the project’s emphasis on preservation, accuracy and technical depth rather than simple nostalgia.

The release comes in two large offline-first editions. The Full edition is 121 GB to download and expands to 174 GB unpacked, while the Lite edition is 14 GB to download and 21 GB unpacked. The museum runs as a single Linux VM with bundled emulators and one-click launchers for Windows and Linux, and it is designed to run on Linux, Windows and macOS, including both x86-64 and Arm64 systems. If needed, it can also install and configure the required hypervisor.

Warkentin has said the project was the culmination of a long-running collection effort and framed it as a multi-platform virtual museum for historical research and preservation. Licensing is handled carefully: the launcher and configuration are distributed under the MAME license, the metadata are under CC-BY-NC-SA, and the operating systems themselves keep their original licenses. For anyone trying to understand how personal computing evolved, the value is direct: this archive keeps lost ideas runnable.