Would you like to try out 600 operating systems?

Virtual OS Museum (https://virtualosmuseum.org) is a vast digital collection of over 1,700 different installations and over 600 operating systems for over 250 platforms that can be downloaded to a computer and run via emulation. The collection is largely the work of one man, Andrew Warkentin, an operating systems developer and historian who has been gradually building the archive of system images since 2003.

The collection is notable for its extraordinary time span. It spans almost the entire history of computing, from the Manchester Baby of 1948, the first stored program computer, to the early versions of Android in 2011. In between are a number of systems that are now known only to a narrow circle of computer enthusiasts, historians and collectors. The collection includes many versions of DOS, MOS for the Acorn BBC Master, and even hobbyist operating systems such as NitrOS-9, which brought more modern features to the Tandy Radio Shack CoCo computers of the 1980s.

The user can see how interfaces were designed, how file managers worked, how limited early development platforms were, and how different the logic of using a computer was before today's graphical environments. For younger users, this is a glimpse into the world before Windows 11, macOS, Android, and iOS, and for older users, it's a chance to nostalgically jump back to the era of Windows 95, DOS, or lesser-known computing environments.

System images typically do not include additional software beyond what was included with the base operating system installation. This means that the user usually gets basic tools such as calculators, text editors, file managers, and similar utilities. The experience can therefore be quite limited, especially on very old systems for which additional programs are difficult to find these days.

For those interested in the history of computing, this is an ideal project. Instead of reading dryly about how old systems worked, the user can try them out firsthand. They can see why some systems were groundbreaking, why others disappeared, and how quickly user expectations changed.