If you ever owned a Mac that booted on a chime, the Virtual OS Museum is the rabbit hole for you. Andrew Warkentin has assembled a single emulation project covering more than 1,700 pre-installed operating systems and apps across 250 platforms. Classic Mac OS. A/UX. NeXTSTEP. System 1.0 through Mac OS 9.

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.

One caveat. The whole museum runs as an x86 Linux VM, so don’t expect speed records on an Apple silicon Mac. You can browse the screenshots and the full list of installations at the project’s site before you commit the disk space.