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'Virtual OS Museum' Lets You Try 570 Extinct Operating Systems (virtualosmuseum.org) 39

Posted by EditorDavid from the virtual-mainframes dept.
You can try 570 extinct operating systems at a new "virtual museum," according to a new article by ZDNet. Their reporter downloaded the ancient OS NeXTSTEP, and was "shocked" by how easy it was to run it, "and by the sheer number of operating systems to choose from." Essentially, what you do is download a zipped file, unzip it, change into the newly created directory, and run the executable. VirtualBox then opens to a Debian Linux instance, where you can select from a very long list of operating systems to run... You can run operating systems like Amiga, Apple I/II/III, Atari, Avigo, Commodore 64, Cray, DEC Alpha, Einstein, Game Boy Advance, GE 200, HP 3000, IBM 1130, iPod touch, Jupiter Ace, Lisa, Macintosh, MIPS-based SBCs, Neo, Newton, NeXT, NORC, Palm, and so many more. You can test the earliest mainframes, later mainframes and minicomputers, workstations and Unix variants, home computers, personal computer operating systems, mobile and embedded adOSes, and research-based and obscure systems. As far as Linux is concerned, you can run early Debian and its derivatives, Red Hat and its derivatives, early Slackware, and more...

There are two editions of the Virtual OS Museum: full and lite. The full edition is currently 174GB and includes everything you need to run these old-school operating systems. The full version does not require a network connection to run. The Lite version is only 14GB and requires an internet connection because it downloads the full OS image you want to use.
Gizmodo notes "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... The Museum itself runs in a virtual machine, which seems kinda fitting — it opens in a virtualized Linux installation and presents you with the full list of available operating systems.

Did you know someone has written a GUI for the Commodore 64? Neither did I! There are simulations of ancient mainframes, like the IBM 1130 (yours for the low, low price of $32,280 — or $41,230 with a disk drive — back in 1965).
There's also a YouTube channel.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00Kfor sharing the news.
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'Virtual OS Museum' Lets You Try 570 Extinct Operating Systems More

'Virtual OS Museum' Lets You Try 570 Extinct Operating Systems

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  • It's not NeXTStep (Score:3)

    by Valgrus Thunderaxe ( 8769977 ) on Sunday May 31, 2026 @11:48AM (#66168126)
    The company was NeXT (with a lower-case 'e'). The name of the operating system was NEXTSTEP (all caps).

  • IBM 1130 (Score:5, Informative)

    by ei4anb ( 625481 ) on Sunday May 31, 2026 @12:24PM (#66168160)
    The first machine I programmed was an IBM 1800 which was an extended version of the IBM 1130 with added cabinets for industrial control. It had 16k words (18 bits) of core memory but with the FORTRAN runtime system loaded there were only 4k words left for the user program so we had to learn how to segment our programs so they could be explicitly paged in/out. That had to be managed by the user program, there were no virtual memory features in the monitor (OS). All of that was done using punched cards :-)
    This museum looks interesting, I will definitely have a look at their IBM 1130 stuff.

    • Re: IBM 1130 (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Two99Point80 ( 542678 ) on Sunday May 31, 2026 @05:46PM (#66168530) Homepage
      I spent a lot of time with the 1130 at the SNET engineering department in the early '70s. Enjoyable, except for debugging the dreaded F101 halt.

      • A schoolboy in the 60's, I got to run FORTRAN programs an 1130 at a nearby college once a week. The most exciting thing was it's complete lack of hardware protection. You want to overwrite the operating system? No problem.

    • The 1130 was a 16-bit machine and could be equipped with up to 32k words. It was not considered a mainframe, quite the opposite, an affordable machine for schools and small companies. It had a low cost line printer that used print mechanisms from 407 accounting machines from the 1950s. The Wikipedia article has many interesting details.

    • yes, but the OS on show are much older.

    • It's 12/days old

      https://youtu.be/jqcuqWTxTNw [youtu.be]

      but this is the first I've heard of it.

      I'll suggest folks light up his torrent before the sharks start circling (and to help his bandwidth costs).

      "This belongs in a museum!"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      It took a long time from submission to it being posted.

      I thought it went into the slush pile.

      • I wouldn't have known about the YouTube post (I'm not subscribed to the whole ecosystem)... my primary news sites are here and HaD, local news (KNSI), and CNN, BBC, and occasionally Al-Jazeera... I take what they all say into account and average them out and get damn close to the truth.
        And, I'm not starting any big stuff by saying that.

        Maybe, the mysterious whoever's behind the server here should look through submissions more often.

  • Now all I need is a DECwriter (Score:4, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday May 31, 2026 @02:11PM (#66168274)

    and I can relive those heady days of my youth, playing Trek on a PDP-11/70 (and wasting copious amounts of tractor-feed paper)!

    • and I can relive those heady days of my youth, playing Trek on a PDP-11/70 (and wasting copious amounts of tractor-feed paper)!

      We used to find a remote terminal - with paper and an acoustic coupler to play Trek. By remote, I mean hidden away in the bowels of a university building where the computer police wouldn’t find us an explain that computer s weren’t for playing games. We also learned that as long as you had 1 cent in your uni account you could log in and stay on as long as you wanted so end of term games lasted for tag team hours. Fun times. When we saw the first remote terminal with a screen instead of paper i

    • For me, it was a Xerox XDS (formerly SDS) Sigma 7... And I learned a lot about programming from studying the BASIC source code of that application. I got yelled at by one of the university's system programmers when I asked her a question "why did they do it this way?" Then she answered my question.

  • .. do they have the Apollo Guidance computer?

    Or the HP 9100A/B?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      .. do they have the Apollo Guidance computer?

      Answered my own question. Never mind.

  • ...but malheureusement without cray.
  • This is too good to be true, it has to be some sort of malware trick. My inner nerd says, even so, its worth it. :-)

    • For most PC-based operating systems, you can find the files on the internet archive. It may take you as long to search for them as to download them, because the files were so small in many cases. I've run NeXTSTEP [archive.org] in some emulator, can't remember which, it wasn't difficult and it worked reliably. I don't see the appeal of doing more than poking at it briefly if you're not running it on real hardware, but there it is. I think I ran it in QEMU/KVM with one of the older hardware models.

  • IIRC from power plant days, our simulator’s programming ran on an emulator because the program was only certified for the mainframe’s OS.
  • I already have a ridiculous number of VMs because I love testing every OS I hear of, so this is great. Downloading the "lite" (still 14G) version now.

    • Trying the full download now, the download link is broken and the torrent is stuck at 5MB of 127GB, so I'll give Lite a try...

  • Massive size. (Score:3)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday May 31, 2026 @05:31PM (#66168518)

    This is a very cool and worthy project but damn if they didn't build this thing terribly because it's 179 gigabytes. I would love to tell you why exactly it's bloated as hell (I have some good guesses) but I can't even view the contents because you have to download it as a 127GiB zip file! To be honest, I'm pretty sure about 5GiB is actual OS data while the rest is an ungodly amount of packaging.

    I have no doubt there is a better way to accomplish this task because this is obscene.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by zelurker ( 1423835 )

      There's no good reason to download the full version unless you want to test all the 570 machines inside! Just take the light one, it will download what it needs, it's quite fast. I tested the nextstep one, it runs awfully slowly in the qemu, but if you have virtualbox installed you can use it to open the vbox file directly (just edit the vbox file to change the locations of the vdi files).
      The images are quite big, for the next you have all the nextstep versions + a few openstep versions and all the apps so

  • Since I owned an oric a long time ago, I was curious about this thing that I didn't know. They should really give more info about what is inside, but anyway I made my research on this one : when you run it, you see a text screen with the name pinforic describing a scene of a text adventure, not really what I expected, I thought it was a software collection ? Actually this pinforic is a port of an infocom interpreter for oric, there is no official version for oric. And this text shown is the very first scree

  • I'm amazed at people's ingenuity and spending good part of their life in making emulators of so many old machine - even though there is no practical use of those emulattions. Truly motivated people. Glad slashdot keeps insprinng now and then.

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