Today someone (who is not on Mastodon) released a collection of more than 570 distinct operating systems, pre-installed with VM configurations for the 250+ different platforms, going back all the way to 1948.
Now, I have to admit I'm posting this without trying it myself, as I'm running low on disk space on this machine.
Because the full download is 121GB (174GB unzipped!). There is also a lighter version at 14GB that will download stuff on demand.
@loadhigh
As a virtual machine packrat, this sounds so good!
Are there backup/alternate download mirrors? @internetarchive maybe?
Ko-fi donation inbound soon.
@JBrianCoyle @internetarchive I'm hoping for a torrent soon, even though that can be tricky for seeders to manage if there will be regular updates.
For now, I truly hope he has an unlimited data plan at his hosting.
@regendans It seems to be a zip file presumably with images in it that you never directly execute. Presumably. (Ok, I can't get a download to actually go right now...) I suppose exploits/etc in the VM softwares themselves allowing escapes can't be 100% ruled out either, but this is definitely not a curl | sudo bash setup.
EDIT: I stand corrected! It's an AppImage, so it is executable. It looks like it uses qemu and AppImages can typically be extracted manually but ymmv.
@nazokiyoubinbou @regendans That's a valid concern.
Extracting the AppImage for the VM images (or figuring out where the Lite version gets them from) and using your own emulator is probably safer. An (accidental) evil payload would be more likely to be in the initial binary than a complex VM escape in the images, I would say.
I'm hoping to clear up enough space tonight, and give it a whirl myself.
@loadhigh Oh wow, this could potentially be super super helpful!
I'll grab the 121. I'm not overflowing with space, but I can spare that much. At least... I'll try to grab the 121... It's, uh, not flying. In fact it's struggling even to make the initial connection. EDIT: Well, it says blocked by cloudflare on my attempt to download so far. Going great!
But yeah, they really really need to put that in a torrent for their own sake and the sake of their downloaders.
Couldn't find a list of system included. Anyone know if it includes Texas Instruments TI99?
Oh my god!
Even Windows CE is on that list, this is fun 😊
2026-05-19 22:01:26 (98.3 KB/s) - Connection closed at byte 2920481700. Retrying.
--2026-05-19 22:01:32-- (try: 7) https://downloads.virtualosmuseum.org/virtual_os_museum-2026.05.19-full.zip
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 206 Partial Content
Length: 129182741459 (120G), 126262259759 (118G) remaining [application/zip]
Saving to: ‘virtual_os_museum-2026.05.19-full.zip’
virtual_os_museum-2026.05.19-full.zip 7%[+==> ... ] 9.37G --.-KB/s eta 36h 50m
@thunfisch I see that the whole project is available there now, too.
My experience with Archive.org torrents has not been the best in the past. Because if the contents of the entry change, the torrent URL will stay the same, leading to you potentially seeding old contents, which clients with an updated torrent file don't accept.
xorgol
CONFIG.SYS: LOADHIGH
J. Brian Coyle
Klingon Sponge
just_one_bear
Ludovic :Firefox: :FreeBSD:
Nick Silkey 📻 N5ILK 🪓🪵 🪣💧
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️
DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-lab
Bezmania
VANTABlack
Sebastian Müller
Ra (Freyja) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩
RalfMaximus
Joshua Byrd
alys
Thomas Tanghus
R.L. Dane 
🍵 
Regendans
Nazo
Autumn Meadow
Furbland's Very Cool Account™
Cykonot
plague-of-grackles 😷🍉🐈⬛
Bytebro 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 🇬🇱
Morgan
Netraven
Jessie Nabein 
☠ Captain Arcee ☠
sleepy62🍁🛠️ 🖥️ 🔬 🌞
Dagnabbit, Pascaline ! 💥
Resuna
Evert Pot
Ed Neal
mjdxp
it/its kitten 
Zach DeLong
Nadia/Надя/नाडिया/娜迪亚/ نادية
JackMex
Treknor
thunfisch
Olivier Mengué
Bart van Leeuwen