this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
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16
$200-ish laptop with a 386 and 8MB of RAM is a modern take on the Windows 3.1 era (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 months ago by salarua@sopuli.xyz to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This could be very useful to run really old PC tied commercial and industrial equipment. There is a surprising amount of old systems still keeping our lives running in small niche ways. It could be:

The fact that this has all the legacy ports of:

  • IEEE 1284 parallel printer port
  • RS-232 serial port
  • a 16 bit ISA slot breakout!

...gives this some of the newest hardware I can think of that still interfaces with old ancient hardware.

[–] Steve@startrek.website 5 points 2 months ago

Me, dumpster diving 286 computers 2 decades ago to make backup controllers for a very profitable machine.

I wonder if that thing is still operating

[–] SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 months ago

I saw a story about this every day for the last four days. Why this product getting so much pushing?

[–] Iloveyurianime@ani.social 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

My second hand t480 is cheaper than that with 512 gigs of ssd storage and 16 gigs of ram

[–] Travelator@thelemmy.club 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

$200? Jeez.

I got a $32 11" Dell Chromebook last month to use as a video player at work, it's great. Stuck in a 128GB microSD and it's better than fine.

And I can listen to the baseball game on it, when I'm not watching Star Trek. 😁

[–] lauha@lemmy.one 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Does your $32 chromebook run dos and windows 95 on bare metal? How is your comment relevant?

[–] kokesh@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It runs Doom, but unplayable speed. They should have run it as 386DX. Had one from AMD, it was running quite well.

[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

looks like the implemented CPU (ULi M6117C) supports a coprocessor interface, so it is entirely possible that a 387sx equivalent could give it floating point capabilities. it's probably not electrically implemented on this specific device to expose the interface though. otherwise yeah no FP sucks

[–] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works -1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'd be interested in the form factor with like a raspberry pi in there.

Less powerful than that seems like a waste.

[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

The point is not power but hardware compatibility. Emulation only goes so far and many, if not most, weird esoteric hardware systems from the 90s depended on idiosyncracies and strange usage of standard busses and weird interactions of the CPU. Emulation almost always breaks this.

[–] 555_1@lemmy.world -1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I’ve never had a problem emulating windows 95.

[–] circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Have you tried emulating it while interfacing with some ancient ISA card?

[–] 555_1@lemmy.world -1 points 2 months ago (3 children)

They sell ISA to USB adapter boards and you can tell the emulator to use the device.

[–] circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 2 months ago

Tell me you've never tried it without telling me you've never tried it.

[–] ZoopZeZoop@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm sure you're the first to think of this! You'll be rich!

[–] 555_1@lemmy.world -1 points 2 months ago

Let me Google that for you.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That will add extra latency from USB. Old programs are not likely to be very tolerant of that.

[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 months ago

also most of those USB adapters likely won't support true hardware switch interrupts, Direct Memory Access, or raw bus control to talk to other cards, which almost every special ISA card actually needs at least one of these to function.

[–] Qkall@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 months ago

i believe the use case is for old tech that require win95/dos ...like interfacing with old science instruments