The Virtual OS Museum opens its doors

Summary

OSes The Virtual OS Museum opens its doors A massive compilation of historic OSes and the emulators to run them The Virtual OS Museum is an epic collection of historically significant operating systems, representing more than 600 OSes across upwards of 250 platforms. It’s all local, so you’ll need a good few gigs of space.The Virtual OS Museum is a giant mixtape for enthusiasts of the history of OS evolution. As an indication of its breadth of coverage, it reaches all the way back to the Manchester Baby – from 1948. Multics, the Xerox Alto, NeXTstep, PowerPC Mac OS X, early versions of Windows NT and Android, and more.It is one hefty layer-cake of code. The project offers two versions to download. The Full edition is a whopping 121 GB download, which unpacks to 174 GB, but includes everything ready for offline use. If that’s a little indigestible, there’s also a “Lite” edition which includes the various emulators, but not the all the disk and tape images of actual vintage OSes: those are downloaded and run on first use. This is a mere 14 GB download, which expands to 21 GB of space. The download contains an x86 Linux VM, and inside that are the various emulators, which are listed on the Credits page. The VM should run on most things: the README has instructions for launching it on Linux, and on both macOS and Windows on both x86-64 and Arm64. On Linux and Windows it runs inside VirtualBox, and on macOS inside QEMU. Either way, the package will install and configure the hypervisor for you if needed – including adding itself to an existing copy, if you already have it installed. There’s a lot in here: the homepage has a section with 45 screenshots and there’s a second page with over 100 more.This means that its licensing is a little complicated. The launcher and its configuration is distributed under the MAME license, which keeps source code available but prohibits commercial use. The metadata of the various OSes is distributed under the CC-BY-NC-SA license. As for th...