I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of

That 'nearly' is important. I can think of one operating system that you cannot possibly have access to, because it was never published. (-:

Impressive curation effort. One comment: at least a few of the examples in the gallery seem to be of the "last, greatest" version, which actually isn't necessarily the greatest, and definitely not the most interesting.

For example, the "Domain_OS SR10.4 - 01 VUE desktop" is a bit confusing, and may cause people to miss actual DomainOS.

Apollo DomainOS (or Domain/IX, or simply Domain) had many unique and interesting things about it, but disappeared soon after being acquired by HP. It looked more like it might look if you took a programmer who had mostly only seen text terminals, and gave them a megapixel display with pixel framebuffer, a mouse, and the freedom to design the keyboard hardware, and told them to make what they would want to use.

VUE (around when the Unix workstation vendors collaborated on standarding on a common desktop environment) was for HP-UX , which was a very different operating system, and entirely different user experience. More of an early attempt at let's give non-power-users an accessible computer with virtual desktops and everything.

Similarly, Solaris had innovative OpenWindows (including but not limited to a networkable display system based on PostScript) before they got the common desktop environment.

SunOS 4.x (retronym "Solaris 1.x") and earlier could run the earlier SunView environment, which was more like monochrome early Mac than the later Open Look look and feel of OpenWindows.

I hadn't realized Domain/OS emulation was viable these days. It's one of the few systems that has actually "lost" features - the terminal-window-like thing (called pads, I think?) when in line mode had a dividing line at the bottom where your unconsumed typeahead was visible and you could continue to edit it until it got read - not just one line, the entire unconsumed input. (Not that it's a particularly desirable feature - it's just one that I'm pretty sure you can't implement with ptys...)

No Pick?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system

My first actual job was working for a local health authority here in the UK, and they had a Pick computer running some database application thing, I think to do with accounting. I had to run the backups. Sorry to be a whinger, I don't mean to belittle the monumental amount of work.

How can I speak with the heavens if you don't have temple OS.

Do you have that Windows 3.1 version that came with the Compaq that had the DE that was like a paper folder instead of an empty desktop, and that you could put the icons in the different tabs of the paper folder?

Is there a way to see a list of the operating systems included without having to download and run the tool?

This triggered a rabbit hole search that had me rediscover Packard Bell Navigator[1]. The nostalgia and joy this page brings me is hard to describe. I hope everyone remembers their formative tech journey so fondly.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Bell_Navigator

What I find interesting about projects like this is how much of the OS "feel" doesn't survive emulation. The visual layer comes through fine, but the things that actually defined the experience — keyboard click latency, the specific mouse acceleration curves of period hardware, the way a CRT scanline gave System 7 fonts a totally different texture than a sharp LCD does, the audible click-thunk of Atari ST or early Mac dialogs — none of that gets preserved.

Run System 7 in an emulator and the menus look right, but the input feels wrong. What we're really preserving in these collections is the screen output, not the interaction. Which is fine for an archive — just worth being honest it's a museum of appearances, not of use.

While we're discussing obscure operating systems, can anyone else remember an obscure Unix where uid 0 was called "avatar" instead of root?

It's one of those strange memories from my youth that I've been unable to confirm as an adult.

An amazing, herculean effort! thumbs up to Andrew

This preservation of old OS is important.

Spread the word, this needs to reach anyone who's interested in it.

It would be great if there was a list of OSes in the collection.

Reminds me of the alt.sysadmin.recovery canonical list of operating systems that suck.

https://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/humor/Unix/os-suck.html

Is there a proper full list without needing to download the very big ZIP archive file?

I don't know if it includes "every operating system I can think of". I can think of some things: TempleOS, BTRON (there might be more than one implementation; I know of an (apparently) abandoned FOSS implementation), Serenity OS, and some others that I do not remember what they are called.

Also, what might be useful for preservation is, in addition to the files and emulation, also the documentation for programming those operating systems. There would also be such a thing of consideration as documentation of old computers (including their instruction sets), which might be a separate project but potentially might be useful in combination with this.

Another thing would be somehow you can download individual systems together with information about the emulation, in case you want to use your own emulators for it instead of installing an existing collection with its own installers and launchers etc.

Some people mention uncommon features (and features that work in an unusual way). I think that would be worth making a article about too, and just because a feature is common does not necessarily make it good.

quite a decent collection. and actual working osses.

one that i noticed missing: Novell Netware, I spent several years in de 90s developing software for it. It was the main office network server software on those days.

3.x, 4.x ran on relatively regular 32-bit PC server hardware. 2.x ran on the 80286 in protected mode, the only OS I know which did that.

Copies can be found at archive.org.

Nice. Reminds me of Frame of Preference, with embedded emulators for all major MacOS, placed on top of images of the machines they ran on, with effects to simulate the grain and color of those machines, and with scripted "goals" and easter eggs.

https://aresluna.org/frame-of-preference/

This is stellar. I've been doing this for a few years myself, but I thought I was killing it with like 70ish OSs. Thank you for all your work!

Would've been cooler if the emulator was implemented within the browser itself, lke DistroSea, or Archive.org.

Fantastic. Ignore any complainers--what is here is great, and having it nicely collected is hugely valuable.

I have long held anxiety that many of these would vanish as certain university archives disappeared. It is nice to see them protected.

Also might be of interest: http://www.typewritten.org/

The rarest possible choice for Amiga (Amiga UNIX) represented. Curious thing to do. Fun project site either way.

Wish it was a bit more searchable but still a great effort.

I am always on the hunt for AST, which was like, a vendors custom shell for Windows 95 but sold\included as if it was an OS in its own right. Its been eaten by history I think.

My first operating system and GUI was GEOS on the Commodore 64. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)

Oh man, this is absolutely amazing. I’ve built a much smaller project with 13 vintage OSes running in the browser, and even at this scale the amount of fiddly work involved was stupidly high. Doing this for 1700+ systems is crazy! Nice work.

Amazing project - and you actually fulfill a dream of mine (to have a collection absolutely all historically interesting UNIX-like OSes in VMs available on demand).

I'll dig through my collection of "abandoned" OS distros to see if I have something that could make an addition to your museum.

I would suggest to crop your screenshots down to the OS being featured. It's a bit confusing to see a picture labeled as IBM AIX but then see GNOME 2 window decorations everywhere.

For those experience with some of these OS, what might be something to explore (try) on these OS for some learning objective. Any call outs feature wise?

I loved those solaris machines in our department lab!

I just love passion projects like this. One person does a ton of work because they care about the thing, and then shares it with the world so everyone can enjoy it.

Pardon a simple question - this implies nested virtualization, or is the second step emulation?

The download is a Linux VM, gotcha.

Are other OS-s nested virtual machines inside that Linux VM, or emulators (in which case, holly mackerel, that is even more impressive :O... and also why??).

Readme seems to imply it's emulators, but it also uses the words "virtual/virtualization" or "VM images" liberally sprinkled.

Could really do with a torrent. 120GB at 3MB/sec...

This is a great resource. Did you run into any weird emulation quirks with the older OSes? I imagine getting some of them to boot wasn't straightforward.

Very impressive! Thank you for doing this.

Scrolling is extremely laggy.

No AIX?

Some of these are runnable in the browser, for example here: https://copy.sh/v86/

Searched, but could not find OS/9.

[edit] No, found it!

This is wonderful. I'm looking forward to looking thru it properly. My earliest "real computer" memories are VAX/VMS and SunTools...

Not a single OS/2 screenshot..

Just a couple of years ago I worked for a client who had a computer with Solaris 2.x running. It was quite a critical piece in the system.

I don't see HAL or WOPR or Skynet or GLaDOS.

Now add VR support and we can visit this museum and be like in a Tron movie. You can even charge a fee anyone entering musium usin VR ;-)

THANK YOU!

This is a treasure trove. And glad you made the whole museum downloadable, so this treasure does not get lost.

VMS? I didn't see it listed.

I don't see TempleOS here unfortunately https://gitlab.com/virtualosmuseum/virtualosmuseum/-/blob/ma...

Where is EMACS?

Blog post: https://andreww591.blogspot.com/2026/05/ive-released-virtual...

I think something got into my eye.

I'd love to go back to the 90s and live it again.

love this stuff. please change the color scheme asap

Great work! please just offer dark mode

Hug of death? Error code 522 on downloads.

quite impressive, how did you collected? just find images online or you actually have all of these OS.

Where's Microsoft Bob?

TENEX and TOPS-20 would be nice

I didn't see ryOS

Wow. That was a bit of nostalgia, just to read some of the names.

Is TempleOS in here?

HeliOS and transputers is one of the most interesting systems ever; if you use Golang and/or know 9front and concurrency you'll be at home, because it was concurrent and multicore literally by design where the CPU 'cores' synced themselves with messages.

https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv4n4/transputer.html

They were pretty much ahead of time with multiprocessing.

Very neat to see this project come to completion Andreww.

Are there any any operating systems that you'd like to add to the collection but haven't been able to find?

Maybe someone here at HN could help with that.

This is awesome.

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This is great