I joyfully reunited with my first Linux distro at the Virtual OS Museum


Virtual OS Museum

This was the first Linux OS I ever used.

Jack Wallen/ZDNET

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ZDNET’s key takeaways

  • The Virtual OS Museum gives you a peek at old-school OSes.
  • You can run any one of hundreds of operating systems.
  • All you need to make this free tool work is VirtualBox.

Every so often, a Linux project comes to my attention that makes me rejoice over this amazing operating system and how far it’s come.

One such initiative — recently brought to my attention — truly blew me away. It’s called the Virtual OS Museum.

With VirtualBox, this museum lets you run various operating systems that are no longer around. 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.

Also: How to connect to a VirtualBox virtual machine from your LAN

I downloaded the Lite version of Virtual OS Museum (far smaller than the full version), fired it up, and then launched an instance of NeXTSTEP (which was the basis for one of my favorite old-school Linux window managers, AfterStep).

Virtual OS Museum

NeXTSTEP was such an amazing OS in its time.

Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET

I was shocked by how easy it was to run this OS and by the sheer number of operating systems to choose from.

The Virtual OS Museum states its purpose clearly: “Want to see the earliest resident monitors? The ancestor of all modern OSes (CTSS)? The earliest versions of Unix? The first OS with a desktop-metaphor GUI (Xerox Star, Pilot/ViewPoint)? Early versions of mainstream OSes? If you want to explore historical OSes and platforms without having to worry about configuring/installing emulators and OSes or corrupting emulated installations, you’ve come to the right place.”

Also: Linus Torvalds admits he has a ‘love-hate relationship with AI’

Sounds like fun, right? Not only can you see how operating systems have evolved over the years, but you can also reminisce about those days of yore when the PC and the OS were both in their infancy.

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.

Also: Microsoft surprises with its first server Linux distribution: Azure Linux 4.0

As far as Linux is concerned, you can run early Debian and its derivatives, Red Hat and its derivatives, early Slackware, and more. 

There’s even Caldera OpenLinux, which was my first Linux distribution I tried (see above). Of course, I had to run that, and my face beamed as it took me back to 1997.

Lite versus Full

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.

Why would you want to use this?

It all comes down to nostalgia. You’re certainly not going to fire up one of these defunct operating systems and use it as your daily driver, but seeing them in action (and interacting with them) is certainly a blast from the past. And given how many operating systems are included with the Virtual OS Museum, I could see myself spending a long, long time with this fun project.

Also: Ubuntu Core 26 offers an immutable Linux you can trust through 2041

The creator of the Virtual OS Museum has a YouTube channel where they showcase installations of various OSes.

If you long for the good old days of operating systems (even those that were exponentially more challenging than what we have today), I highly recommend giving this wonderful tool a try. You can use it on Linux, MacOS, or Windows; the only requirement is a VirtualBox installation. Enjoy.





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