Virtual OS Museum Archives 570 Systems

For readers in the UK retro scene, a new preservation project has landed with serious scope, Andrew’s Virtual OS Museum now offers more than 570 operating systems across over 250 platforms, all packaged as pre-configured virtual machines.

Hackaday reports that the project is detailed on Andrew’s blog and in an accompanying YouTube video. The archive is available as a 128 GB download, and there is also an option to help seed the torrent for others.

The collection goes well beyond familiar desktop nostalgia. It includes systems from IBM Big Iron and VAXen, along with Texas Instruments graphing calculators. Andrew has also included the Manchester Baby, one of the earliest stored-programme computers, with its known software.

The main download opens into a modern Linux host, which acts as the museum’s launcher. From there, users can start a wide range of operating system and system combinations, including older Linux distributions running in their own virtual machines. Andrew is still debugging and expanding the collection, with more additions planned.

For enthusiasts, researchers and students, the appeal is simple, it lowers the barrier to trying obscure systems that are otherwise hard to find or run. It is not the same as original hardware, or even cycle-accurate FPGA emulation, but it does make a huge slice of computing history easier to access.

For more retro news, keep an eye on RetroShell news. If you are interested in hardware preservation too, MiSTer’s FPGA work remains a useful comparison point for classic system emulation, with details on the project’s official site at mister-devel.github.io.

Originally published by Hackaday. Read the original report.