From 1948's Manchester Baby to early Android, the Virtual OS museum runs the entire history of computing

There exists a Virtual OS Museum, and it is exactly what it sounds like. Andrew Warkentin, a developer who has been quietly collecting emulator images since 2003, has packaged the lot into a Linux VM that boots over 1,700 pre-installed operating systems on a normal laptop. The span runs from 1948's Manchester Baby, the first stored-program computer, through to early Android and iOS—570 distinct OSes across more than 250 platforms.The point of the project is that none of it is fiddly. Emulators, install media, device configs, version-specific regressions—Warkentin has done that work. You open the launcher, pick an entry, it runs. Break something, roll it back with a snapshot. The VM sits on QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM, and installers for Windows, macOS, and Linux ship in the box.Most of the famous names turn up. Windows 1.0 through early Longhorn betas. Classic Mac OS through Mac OS X 10.5 PPC. OS/2, BeOS, NeXTSTEP, PalmOS, Newton OS. The weirder corners are the fun ones, though—TempleOS, Plan 9, QNX, ZetaLisp, Oberon, plus mainframe relics like CTSS, MVS, Multics, and TOPS-10/20. Home computer heads get the BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 8-bits, MSX, Atari 8-bit. Xerox Star Pilot, often called the first OS with a desktop-metaphor GUI, is in. So is software written for the Manchester Baby itself.What you do not get is a stocked machine. Installations ship with whatever shipped with the OS originally—calculators, file managers, text editors. Sourcing apps for CTSS in 2026 is your problem.The asking price is disk space. The full offline edition is 121GB zipped, 174GB unpacked. A 14GB lite version pulls images on first boot and is the saner pick for most people.Two things worth flagging. The host VM is x86-only, so Apple silicon and ARM machines will run it slowly. And Warkentin calls this a preliminary release, with some OSes only working in specific emulator builds.