I've released a virtual museum with nearly every OS you can think of...

 

 

Today I am (finally) releasing the Virtual OS Museum, which is the world's first multi-platform interactive virtual museum of operating systems and standalone applications, implemented as a Linux VM.

Nearly all well-known OSes and platforms (and many obscure ones) are included in some form, spanning the entire history of stored-program computing from the 1948 Manchester Baby to the present day. This is the result of over 20 years of collecting emulators and VM images; over 1700 VM installations are included, across over 250 platforms, representing nearly 600 distinct OSes.

I have put a lot of effort into making this readily accessible; all OSes and emulators are pre-installed, and a cross-emulator graphical launcher with a snapshot feature to revert VM installations to a working state is included. Shortcuts to run the OS museum VM on Windows, macOS, and Linux are included (and it is possible to run it on pretty much anything that runs QEMU or VirtualBox).

The main window of the launcher

Unix PC SVR2 and XVM/RSX with the launcher in the background

Even though the state of software preservation has definitely improved over the past two decades, with many different archive sites being put up and emulators of obscure platforms being written, many of these projects are not particularly accessible, with emulators and OSes often requiring complex setup, and regressions in emulators breaking certain OSes in later versions. This project is an attempt to make readily accessible as much of the history that's been preserved in various places as possible.

Softlanding Linux System 1.0

For people who don't want to download the full version (which is around 170G) there is a much smaller lite version (around 20G) that includes only the base Linux system with the installer, emulators, and launcher, downloading guest VMs the first time they are run rather than having everything included.

Currently, while I have tried to test at least one guest installation for each emulator within the OS museum VM, and all guests have been confirmed to work at some point in the past on my machine, testing of all guest installations within the OS museum VM is still an ongoing process (a little under half have been tested so far).

AFROS with XaAES and TeraDesk

I will be continuing to add VMs to this project; I still have enough install images sitting around that I can easily reach well over 2000 VMs. This also includes some OSes that don't currently run in emulation because the emulator is incomplete or broken.

I also have a YouTube channel where I will be posting about my efforts to fix OSes currently broken in emulation, as well as reviews/tours of OSes I've already installed. I also have a Discord/Fluxer community where you can discuss retrocomputing and OS development, suggest stuff to add, or report issues. If you wish to support me monetarily, you can subscribe to me on Patreon or send me a tip on https://ko-fi.com/andreww591.

Sharp Personal CP/M for MZ-2500

I had thought I would be releasing this a lot sooner. I had been focusing almost exclusively on UX/RT for a while because I had some people from a major conglomerate interested in using it as replacement for QNX to the point where they paid me to fly out to meet them, but a couple months after I met them they cancelled/suspended their project, and I started focusing more on getting the OS museum ready for release, and getting it to a point where it's actually half-decent took way more work than I thought (at one point I was thinking of possibly just doing a quick-and-dirty release without a graphical launcher but then decided I was going to make something more approachable). 

LisaOS 3.1

 

In addition to adding new OSes and emulators to the OS museum, I'm going to be working on UX/RT again soon and am probably one commit away from getting simple user-level test programs working on it, with a shell soon to follow. I haven't really done much with it at all for a while because I was focusing almost entirely on the OS museum, but now I will try to split my time between both projects about equally. I hope that I get commercial interest in UX/RT again once it's actually running user programs, but I'm not sure if that will ever happen again because of my severely crippling tendency to stay quiet that makes it extremely difficult to make connections with people. I will of course be posting regular updates about both UX/RT and the OS museum here and on YouTube. I am going to try as hard as I can to try to push past my tendency to stay quiet; I will probably never be able to talk about random crap all the time like just about everybody else does, but I will try to post about my projects as much as I can going forwards.