I joyfully reunited with my first Linux distro at the Virtual OS Museum
I joyfully reunited with my first Linux distro at the Virtual OS Museum
https://www.zdnet.com/article/reunited-with-my-first-linux-distro-at-the-virtual-os-museum/
Publish Date: 2026-05-23 07:00:00
Source Domain: www.zdnet.com
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).
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…
