The history of computing is littered with the remains of forgotten operating systems—some rendered obsolete by technological progress, some that never quite captured the public imagination, and some just so aggressively useless that everyone would rather forget they ever existed. But we shouldn’t forget! And happily, there’s a new project devoted to preserving the history of all manner of strange and wonderful OSes: the Virtual OS Museum, a repository of some 1700 operating systems that date back to the dawn of computing as we know it. This project is all the more remarkable for being the work of one man: Andrew Wartenkin, who has been collecting OS images for over two decades. Of course, Wartenkin didn’t write all the emulation software himself, and he maintains a list of credits to give credit where it’s due. But the work of collecting all the Museum’s material, making sure the various emulations work, and creating a single, fairly seamless point of entry for people interested in exploring them—that’s all Wartenkin. If you’re interested in having a look yourself, you should know that the Museum isn’t a website where you can just click through to different OS emulations: you need to download and install the project on your computer, and you might need to do a bit of hacking to get it to work.
The Virtual OS Museum Lets You Emulate 1700+ Operating Systems From as Far Back as 1948
The history of computing at your fingertips.














