If you ever owned a Mac that greeted you with that iconic boot chime, the Virtual OS Museum is the perfect rabbit hole. Andrew Warkentin has built a massive single emulation project featuring more than 1,700 pre-installed operating systems and applications spanning 250 different platforms — from Classic Mac OS and A/UX to NeXTSTEP, and everything from System 1.0 all the way through Mac OS 9.
MacSparky:
It ships two ways. A 121GB full bundle that runs offline, and a lighter 14GB starter that pulls each VM image down on first launch. Either one drops you into a desktop you probably haven’t seen in twenty years.
The fun of a project like this is that it is not trying to be polished. It is a labor of love by one person who wanted every operating system in one place and decided to make it happen. The full list runs 1948 to today, and stepping through it is like flipping through a textbook of computing history.
If you want to see where Apple’s modern OS came from, fire up NeXTSTEP. Most of the ideas that landed in Mac OS X a decade later are sitting right there.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s definitely not fast on an Apple Silicon Mac, as it runs as an x86 Linux VM, but it is fun! Check out the Virtual OS Museum here.
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