8086 Linux still exists; people are working on it: https://github.com/jbruchon/elks https://github.com/jbruchon/elks But it's still pretty unstable. If you ha

8086 Linux still exists; people are working on it: https://github.com/jbruchon/elks https://github.com/jbruchon/elks But it's still pretty unstable. If you have a spare 8086 and want a Unixoid, go look up Minix 2 (not 3). It's not very comfortable on a 8086 with 640kB, but it works. Proper filesystem, processes, Bourne shell, the lot. It even has a self-hosted C compiler. You can get real work done on it (slowly). https://www.minix-vmd.org/pub/minix/2.0.2/ https://www.minix-vmd.org/pub/minix/2.0.2/ Later versions really want a 286, but that gives you proper memory protection too. Of course, if you want any processes bigger than 64kB code / 64kB data, you need to upgrade to Minix 386.