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https://www.hackster.io/news/andrew-warkentin-s-virtual-os-museum-collects-174gb-of-ready-to-use-vintage-operating-systems-79b8c3954bd1>
“Developer and vintage computing historian Andrew Warkentin has released the
most exhaustive collection of operating systems you could imagine, all ready to
run in a virtual machine: the Virtual OS Museum.
"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 [Virtual Machine]," Warkentin explains
of the impressive undertaking. "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."
While plenty of effort has been put into preserving classic games and software
packages, less thought is usually given to the operating systems on which they
ran. Still less focus has been put on making software preservation archives
accessible even to less-technical users: "emulators and OSes often requiring
complex setup," Warkentin explains, "and regressions in emulators breaking
certain OSes in later versions."
The Virtual OS Museum is Warkentin's answer to that: around 174GB of operating
system images, configured to be ready-to-run: just pick what you'd like to see
from a graphical menu and you'll be transported back in time to anything from
early versions of Microsoft's Windows to the Apple LisaOS — or even, as
Warkentin highlights, software designed for the Manchester Baby, one of the
first stored-program computers.”
Via Esther Schindler.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
