![]() The process was additionally complicated (still is!) by forcing you to always have to go through all the steps of failure just to get to the “Have Disk” option that should have been available right at the beginning. Much of the magic of a “just worked” Win 95 install was up to the authors of the driver installers knowing WTH they had to do to make Windows accept the correct settings, then not decide later it knew “better”. It was either install Windows 95 and the drivers and it *just worked*, or it was wrestling the bear to *force it to comply* with the hardware configuration. I called it Jumper and Stay! But Windows 95 often had its own ideas about what resources sound cards ought to use, requiring forcing manual configuration because if you pried loose whatever device it had incorrectly assigned to the sound card’s IRQ, DMA, port etc, it’d swap something else to the wrong resources. I had to actually blow the dust out of the 486 every leap year, even had to reboot it twice. Why the PS/2 insanity? Well it was a passively cooled CPU and from the era of IBM still overbuilding things, so I thought I could literally bury it somewhere and it would chug along regardless. However, I had plenty of 486 stuff so threw together a 486 dx2/66 and put freesco on it and that served well for 5 years or so. I was looking at $100 for a decent NIC and $100 for a decent HDD which was a bit too much for a spare parts project. Now this thing only had one ISA slot, and I picked up this card I thought was MCA, looked up the chipset, linux supported it, got way far deep into setting up the linux install, then realised A) I wanted more than the 80MB HDD and THAT was a microchannel special also and hard to find larger ones for cheap, and B) that the microchannel network card I had was NOT microchannel, derp, it was somebody elses circa 1990 or 1991 32 bit bus that never took off. While I’ve got Puppies on PIIIs, and Focal Fossa running on relatively ancient Turions (Think it’s about the most ancient CPU it CAN run on), the last time I tried a current at the time linux on a 386 was an effort in 2001 to build my own lightweight router from scratch, with an IBM PS/2 machine… one of the very slowest PS/2 386s, an SX16. The blazing fast new processors makes us wait more. Now I turn on the smartv, and wait for WebOS loading turn on the BluRay, and wait for it loading (just to wait a little more when the disc is read) turn on the XBox, and wait loading, then wait login, then wait game loading, then wait an update download, then wait the update installation, then it reboots… I remember turning a tv on, it works instantly push a VHS tape into the videocassete, instant play turn on the Atari 2600 with the River Raid cartridge and instantly smashing a bridge. It’s like programmers doesn’t have any concern anymore with hardware limitations, and the whole experience gets as slow as their ancient counterparts. The more available power, the more garbage/bloat. Of course, the old HP will give up its soul if you try CPU hungry programs, as it lacks power and memory.īut I also believe that we are somewhat walking backwards with the “cpu/memory availability” and speeds. I have an almost two decade old HP notebook that runs a 10 year old linux distro, and it still go as fast as a new i7 with windows 10 (for tasks like office and internet). Posted in Retrocomputing Tagged 486, i386, linux Post navigationĪgreed. Never complain that your Raspberry Pi Zero is slow again, we’ve come a long way! It’s not entirely useful and its sole purpose was to see whether Linux could see a large hard drive on the 486, but it’s still a version 5.6 Linux kernel booting from floppy on an ancient computer. It was possible though with the tinyconfig make option, and after finding a small enough root filesystem courtesy of Aboriginal Linux, a bootable floppy was created. You can watch it in action in the video below the break.Ī recent Linux kernel is rarely if ever compiled for something as small as a floppy disk, so getting one to boot from such ancient media appeared to be a challenge. But what if you were to take a current Linux kernel and stick it on a floppy in a machine from the early 1990s, with meagre RAM? did just that, with not a 386 but a 486, sporting what would have been an impressive for the time 36MB of RAM. Though the 386 architecture is now ancient, the current Linux kernel can still be compiled for it and many distributions still maintain an i386 branch to provide broad compatibility for later machines able to run i386 code. If you have ever studied the early history of the GNU/Linux operating system in its many forms, you’ll have read that developed his first kernel for his Intel 386-based computer.
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