A single developer has quietly assembled what may be the most comprehensive runnable archive of operating systems in existence.
The Virtual OS Museum contains more than 1,700 distinct installations covering over 600 operating systems across 250 platforms, all available for download and local emulation. The project is largely the work of Andrew Warkentin, a developer and OS historian who started collecting disk images in 2003. The library spans nearly eight decades of computing history, from the Manchester Baby in 1948 - credited as the first stored computer program - to early Android builds from 2011. Hundreds of obscure systems round out the collection, including DOS variants that likely exist in runnable form nowhere else.
Software preservation is a quiet crisis that most people only notice after the fact. Disk rot, proprietary formats, and licensing ambiguity have erased more computing history than most engineers realize, and emulation projects like this one are frequently the only reason any of it survives in usable form. When a researcher wants to understand why a particular OS design choice failed, they need something they can actually run - not a Wikipedia entry.
Twenty-three years of solo cataloging is a long time. Most institutions with dedicated funding and staff don't sustain that kind of continuity.