A Canadian developer has been collecting operating systems for more than two decades to build the largest virtual museum in history. The best of all is that anyone can download the operating systems through their website. We tell you all the details.
What is this about? He Virtual OS Museum is a project created and maintained by Andrew Warkentin, a computer developer and historian, who has been collecting emulators and virtual machine images since 2003. The result is a collection of more than 1,700 different installations representing more than 600 operating systems for more than 250 different platforms. All of this can be executed directly on a modern computer, without the need for old hardware.
Preservation. There is a paradox in software preservation. Classic games and the most popular applications receive a lot of attention, but often the operating systems on which those same applications ran have been left in the background. Furthermore, just as points out Warkentin himself, emulators and operating systems “often require complex configuration,” and emulator updates can break certain systems from working in later versions.
The Virtual OS Museum was born precisely to solve that, offering a pre-configured and ready-to-use collection, without the need for advanced technical knowledge.
What it includes. The journey begins in 1948, with the Manchester Baby (considered the first computer to run a stored program) and reaches the first versions of Android. According to details Heise Online, the catalog covers the first mainframes, minicomputers such as the DEC PDP-11workstations Unix (SunOS, IRIX, NeXTSTEP), home computers (Commodore, ZX SpectrumBBC Micro, Atari), and a very wide representation of desktop systems, from Windows 1.0 until the first betas of longhornpassing through OS/2, BeOS, or Mac OS X 10.5. There is also room for rarer and research systems such as SmalltalkOberon or Plan 9.
How it works technically. The museum is laid out as a virtual machine complete for VirtualBoxQEMU or UTM, with GNU/Linux and the Xfce desktop installed. When booting, a launcher developed by Warkentin opens from which the user can select the system they want to explore. Additionally, snapshots allow you to restore any installation to its initial state with a couple of clicks if something gets corrupted, and the launcher includes an update function to selectively keep systems up to date.
Complete systems. Warkentin has not only limited himself to dumping raw images. Many systems start with the tools, development environments and applications typical of their time, as they were actually used then.
Weight. The complete edition It occupies 121 GB compressed and 174 GB uncompressed. For those who do not have that space, there is a Lite version of about 14 GB that downloads the images as the user requests the systems.
And there is still more to come. Warkentin himself recognize which still has material for more than 1,000 additional installations. Its stated goal is that, if a working version of an operating system exists, it will fit into the museum in a format that anyone can run on a current laptop or desktop.
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