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Installing Linux into a 286 laptop from the year 1989
- musicale 5y agoMore like "Install a 2021 Rpi Running Linux into a 1989 laptop" but brilliant nonetheless. I really like the idea of using the Pi 0 as a "coprocessor" for vintage machines and/or using the legacy machine as a terminal for the Pi. You could potentially run X11 or VNC on the 286 also. The Pi of course can act as a Wi-Fi and SSL proxy, etc..
- dnautics 5y agoI feel like that's why they said "into" and not "on"
- ineedasername 5y agoSure-- still a misleading headline though. There's not much in the headline that truly indicates what the author was actually doing. "Into" doesn't begin to describe the fact that Linux was on an rPi, not the laptop. In the context of software like an OS, you don't expect "install" to mean a hardware device unless that's specified. If the headline was "Installing Linux into a TV from 1989" you wouldn't expect it to actually just be the author shoving a linux-capable SBC in there. The article has merit but when the headline is pure click bait it's difficult for me to look past that.
- varjag 5y agoI think anyone remembering TVs from 1989 would in fact expect that.
- ineedasername 5y agoWhen I wrote it I was envisioning some high end TV from the time, like the Sharp Nintendo TV, and the expanded RAM of a specific cartridge like some of the 3rd-party multi-game cartridges. Or maybe something smaller like LUnix. If it wasn't that, I would expect a more truthful headline like "Embedding Linux SBC into a 1989 Television". If the headline of this had been "Embedding rPi Zero into a 1989 Laptop Chasis" then I would have though oh cool and checked it out rather than being annoyed that clickbait made it onto the HN front page.
- varjag 5y agoThat was a really oddball product that most people never heard about let alone considered owning. My parents bought a higher-end '89 Sony model back then. What it meant was a tuner up to 40 channels, a whopping 25" Trinitron tube curved only in one degree (i.e. cylindrical) and OSD for most functions. The pinnacle of TV technology was Picture-in-Picture, and that's about it.
- II2II 5y agoThe video is worth watching. While popping Raspberry Pi's into old computers is straightforward, reviving such an old machine took considerably more skill. (Example: repairing damage to the PCB from capacitor leakage.)
- tluyben2 5y agoI guess I have been lucky; I have 1000s of machines from 196x-200x (my 'newest' are Sun / SGI machines) and I have only had 2 capacitor leak cases, further everything that is not PC is working. I have a few PCs working, but compared to home computers of the 80s/90s or workstations of the same era, PCs seem to die much faster. The homecomputers from the 80s (ZX Spectrum, Commodore PET/16/Vic20/64/Amiga, MSX-1,2) all just switch on like I flew back in time. Sometimes the belt of the floppy drive breaks, but I have many of those.
- jerf 5y agoWell, then do I have the video for you: https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0 https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0 Bit of a spoiler to post it in this context, but still worth it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ronsor 5y agoThis title is sort of clickbait. I was expecting to see something about ELKS[0]. [0] https://github.com/jbruchon/elks https://github.com/jbruchon/elks
- tialaramex 5y agoWow. I had no idea ELKS was still being developed. I think it may even have been last century when I last saw it boot. I wonder if Al knows there are still people working on it.
- anigbrowl 5y agoYeah, I was immediately suspicious because Linux 1.0 was 386+ only due to memory management needs. but I did get a faint twinge of nostalgia for the orange-tinted plasma display on a portable that had the size, weight, and aesthetics of several bricks.
- Fnoord 5y agoSure, same with [1]. I still think its cool. What would be a better title though? [1] https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/2021/06/24/android-9-on-a-gsm-phone-from-year-2000/ https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/2021/06/24/android-9-on-a-gs...
- fsiefken 5y agoWouldn't fuzix be a better alternative on a 286? not that expect using a 286. if i'm going to a more simple processor i would do it for the low power consumption it'd could bring https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-8086/msg00863.html https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-8086/msg00863.html
- anthk 5y agoMinix 2 is better, it has networking support. Check my comments at these HN threads.
- emsign 5y agoBut it's technically correct. It says "into" not "onto". :) But I got fooled as well.
- CyberRabbi 5y agoDoes anyone know if a 16-bit port of Unix-like OS ever existed in the first place? What would the C ABI be in that case? I’m guessing: char: 8 bits short,int,long: 16 bits Anyone have experience working with such a system?
- emidln 5y agoXenix (an official port of System 7) was available for Intel 286s from Microsoft. There were a number of Unix-like systems for 16 bit systems, and the Ancient Unixen were initially running on 16bit processors (notably the PDP-11). You can run 16bit unix in a simulator today.
- anyfoo 5y agoIt was even available for 8086, XENIX 8086. Another 8086 UNIX at that time was PC/IX. I played around with them both, and they both have upsides and downsides.
- ghostDancer 5y agoXenix from SCO and Microsoft. At least it ran on a 286. Can't answer about the C ABI.
- benttoothpaste 5y agoThere were a few. - minix 1.0 could run on XT with a floppy disk - coherent version < 4 could run on AT 286 - Xenix had a 286 version as well
- a-dub 5y agocoherent on a 286 was my first experience with unix on intel hardware. good ol' mark williams corporation. i remember it had one hell of a doorstop book that they referred to as "the lexicon."
- icedchai 5y agoI remember the book that came with Coherent 4.x. It was great! I already knew C, but learned a ton of POSIX / Unix-specific stuff from that book.
- marcodiego 5y agoWhy not elks? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embeddable_Linux_Kernel_Subset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embeddable_Linux_Kernel_Subset
- caymanjim 5y agoI was going to say that I installed Linux on plenty of 286s back in the day, but after thinking about it some more, they must have all been 386s. My first few Linux systems involved manually compiling the kernel and downloading and compiling individual GNU tools one at a time. The first kernel version I remember installing was 0.96, right around September 1992.
- eb0la 5y agoI remember a friend in the lab downloading linux and saving it in 3 1/4" floppies. He used about 100 disks. Two months later you could buy a magazine with Slackware linux on CDRom :-)
- johnwalkr 5y agoYou could also download a boot disc for the installer, and connect to Slackware and install directly from FTP.
- anthk 5y agoInternet connections were too expensive back in the day.
- johnwalkr 5y agoThat's true but it was still a good option if you could get your PC to a university lab. Shortly later you could also usually find a cd burner in a university lab. The grandparent commenter's friend must have installed slackware in a narrow time period where floppies were the only feasible option.
- nicetryguy 5y agoI was thinking that you need a 386 minimum with extended memory to run the earliest versions of Linux but yeah no nevermind it's a Raspberry Pi... 286's were pretty ancient by 89 anyway. The first 486 was released that same year.
- Narishma 5y agoThe 286 was still extremely popular by the early 90s, even if it was first released a decade or so earlier.
- nicetryguy 5y agoThey didn't chew up as much power so you did find them in lower budget laptops like the one in the article.
- ghaff 5y agoDoubtless there were still systems around. But the 80286 had a very weird sort of virtual memory architecture--not that it mattered too much pre mainstream true virtual memory OS support. And it had been superseded since 1985 at a time when PCs were never really fast enough.
- treeman79 5y agoIn college 486s were getting very dated. We still maintained an 8086 ibm xt lab for typing classes. Maintaining those machines was something
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoI would be genuinely interested in a multi-decade grid of what various price points bought in inflation-adjusted dollars by year for say, dell or compaq/hp over the years, say for price points in increments of $500. Like my rock-bottom "Workforce 486" that was $2000 back in 1993 or so: 486 dx2/66, 250MB HDD, 4MB RAM ordered from the back of Computer Shopper.
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- gandalfian 5y agoI did my schoolwork on a 286 laptop. It was cheap... Pleasant gray-scale screen, Dos 6, windows 3.1 with pipes and reversi it was really OK. Duke nukem 2d, joust and lemmings all in 1mb of ram. Wasn't that bad really.
- treeman79 5y agoI learned to program on that setup at home in 4th grade. Games wouldn’t run right, so I got the big dos manual and read the entire thing and started messing with boot setting to free more memory
- ansible 5y agoEven if you didn't run many (or any TSRs like Sidekick), there was a bit of fiddling to maximize the amount of the first 640K bytes available. IIRC, you could load the commonly used Microsoft stuff in the upper memory 384K. This seems to be close to what I used to do: https://www.computerhope.com/ac.htm https://www.computerhope.com/ac.htm
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- plafl 5y agoI could have written your comment. I sometimes think that it's not that children learn faster, it's just that they are used to be totally lost and keep trying
- probably_wrong 5y agoIn my first semester of Computer Science (early 2000s) I had the issue that my family computer was always busy. So I took our 286 from the closet and set it up in my room - I just needed a C compiler after all, and 34Mb hard drive space ought to be enough for everybody. I wanted to use Linux but you need a 386 or higher for that, and DOS was already installed anyway. After about a month my mom convinced my father to get me a new PC, probably annoyed by the sound of the dot matrix printer at night. But honestly, I agree with you: it wasn't that bad.
- ineedasername 5y agoTitle is misleading. Linux is on a raspberry pi, not the original laptop hardware.
- anthk 5y agoThis is better. https://minix1.woodhull.com/hints.html#small https://minix1.woodhull.com/hints.html#small If you can get lynx running, you could access gopher and thus, gopher://hngopher.com Lynx for Minix 2.0.{2,3,4} https://minix1.woodhull.com/pcontrib/lynx285p2b.txt https://minix1.woodhull.com/pcontrib/lynx285p2b.txt More software for Minix 2 https://minix1.woodhull.com/pcontrib/ https://minix1.woodhull.com/pcontrib/
- dlevine 5y agoMy first computer was a 286 (desktop) back in 1989, with 1MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. And an NEC VGA monitor, which cost quite a lot back then. It was originally the family computer, but eventually became a hand-me-down when my parents upgraded. I managed to get Windows 3.1 running on it, and it actually wasn't so slow. The first computer I ran Linux on was a 486.
- outside1234 5y agoI had totally forgot about Kermit. The rest of this article was clickbait, but that reference was awesome, and incredible to think that folks are still using it all this time later.
- a-dub 5y agothe most interesting thing about kermit is the guy who wrote it and his large and interesting web presence: http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/ http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/ military vet who completed columbia's general studies program, then took a job with the university. maintains awesome webpages on: * computing history at columbia: http://columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/ http://columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/ * 1968 protests at columbia: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/1968/ http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/1968/ among many other things... definitely worth a look!
- hansor 5y agoKermit sucks, ZMODEM is way faster in real life over 9600 PPP/SLIP links. I never managed to get Kermit faster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZMODEM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZMODEM
- supernintendo 5y agoI’d love to see a performance comparison between that 286 laptop and the Raspberry Pi that went into it.
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- ridiculous_fish 5y agoMy first Linux install was a Mac IIsi, which had a Motorola 68030. Linux required a hardware FPU which the 030 lacked, but there were daughtercards that provided the missing FPU, and then Linux worked. It didn't do much though!
- Teknoman117 5y agoAre you sure? Linux doesn't require hardware floating point. Are you thinking of an MMU? The EC SKU 68030's didn't have them and could be provided externally.
- don-code 5y agoBack in 2007 I had a "laptop crisis" in which I went from having a laptop on me at all times, to not having a laptop at all, for about a month. My home situation was pretty good, but my school situation... not so much. I ended up doing enough of a restore of my dad's old (1989, I think?) 386 laptop and parallel Ethernet adapter. The details were something like: 1. The rechargeable battery was dead, but it was a 4.8-volt NiCad. It ran beautifully off three alkaline D batteries, strapped to the back. I just had to disconnect the batteries out whenever I had it plugged into the wall, to prevent them from charging. 2. The hard drive wouldn't spin up, so I ended up making a DOS boot disk with an SSH client (SSHDOS) and ODI drivers for the NIC, as well as the bog standard MS-DOS editor. 3. When I had Internet connectivity (read: wall proximity to Ethernet), I used SSHDOS to connect to a remote IRIX host, and used Lynx from there. Lynx was painfully slow on the 386, and SSL was right out. Not that much used it in 2007. 4. I used the MS-DOS editor as my daily-driver text editor. My workflows then, as now, are mostly text-based, so this was a pretty easy change. Of course, I couldn't help but add a sticker to the lid: "up to 10x faster than your malware".
- bartvk 5y agoIn 2007, I'm amazed that someone still kept an IRIX box up somewhere. I remember my uni having one around 2001, and it was regarded as positively ancient.
- eb0la 5y agoI've got a SGI Indigo in my mother's house. Before the pandemic still booted. Of course I forgot the root password, but the 4GB scsi disk is still alive. Of course the clock is somewhere in 199[2-5] because my Irix version wont' let me log in after January 1, 2000.
- leetrout 5y agoYou can get the latest release of IRIX online if you’re feeling up to the task and have a CD burner. https://archive.org/details/IRIX6530 https://archive.org/details/IRIX6530
- j4yav 5y agoI was quite poor so only had old computers growing up, so I used Minix on everything. These days there is still ELKS which runs on the real old hardware, rather than inserting a Pi into the case.
- RalfWausE 5y agoFunny... the last few days i was thinking about refurbishing an old Toshiba T1200 i have lying around to use as my Laptop at work. Why? Now... most of the stuff that is not direct technical stuff i do is text based (writing reports, creating spreadsheets with calculations for projects etc.), and even not a small part of the technical side of the job is done in hooking up to the serial port of a production line. The transactions with our vendors at work is mostly via fax (yeah, it still exists and is used in germany... ESPACIALLY with our vendors and partners)... The funny thing is, i am really confident, that i COULD do 99% of my work via a machine of the 80s without losing much comfort.
- prvc 5y ago>Installing Well, yes, something's getting installed in the physical sense (so not quite entirely clickbait). Wouldn't it be great to have a relatively routine way of repurposing old laptops, which often have very good traits, by using them as terminals for a replaceable on-board compute module (through VNC or what have you)? For instance, an enclosure that fits in the space occupied by the optical drive or Ultrabay, and uses the existing interface for its connection. What would be needed to be created and disseminated is a design for the enclosure (and maybe someone to make them) and software for the client.
- okr 5y agoI remember, when chatting was popular, we did exactly that. But right now, it is not worth it. I want to make computers disappear in my life, to support it invisibly. But these old machines, big, loud, moving parts, hm, not for me.
- mkl 5y agoI had an 8086 "laptop" for a while in the 90s, mostly as a novelty. It took something like 10 C batteries (though I never took it anywhere as it was 5kg), had 512kB of RAM, no hard disk, two 720kb floppy drives, a full size keyboard (!), a flip up monochrome LCD screen similar to this one, and an external monochrome monitor port (but you could only use one screen at a time, controlled by DIP switches). I think it might have been this one: https://www.peterkernwein.de/Rechengeraete-Sammlung/amstrad_ppc512.htm https://www.peterkernwein.de/Rechengeraete-Sammlung/amstrad_.... More pictures of a similar model here: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=32543 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=32543 I mainly used it with the external screen for reading text files and amateur ebooks, at the end of my bed.