3 ms·
As a keeper of pretty much every computer I've ever owned, I think the Nascom-1 from 1979 (2MHz Z80, 768 bytes of RAM, no, that's not a misprint) is out even if
by zh3 5y ago
As a keeper of pretty much every computer I've ever owned, I think the Nascom-1 from 1979 (2MHz Z80, 768 bytes of RAM, no, that's not a misprint) is out even if it does have a video display and full-size keyboard.
Maybe a PDP-11/03 or 11/23? Too noisy, I think. And while RT-11 is lovely, I'd be limited to writing text, C, and Fortran. Oh, and PDP-11 assembler (maybe just punch the opcodes in in octal, as it's so easy to translate in your head on a PDP-11).
Amiga 500? Nope, won't run GCC.
A 286 or a 386 is looking more serious. Some of them have a good 8Mb of RAM, VGA output and ethernet. Could even run linux, something like 2.2 from the days when a system worked well with 4Mb RAM.
Any 486 would definitely do it, all the 486/66 boxes just turn on and go (one has been doing daily duty as an autoattendant for maybe 15, 20 years). Starting to get to the point where there's a DVI output, so nice text on an LCD (the massive 27" Diamondvision CRT can stay wrapped up).
Hmmm....now, a Gateway 166MHz Pentium. That's nice, because it's pretty much silent, runs 100Mb ethernet and has a Matrox video card. Zero problems working with that for a week (or longer) except for web browsing (there's always links/lynx et al).
An 800Hz PIII with 512mb of RAM and an Nvidia 7600GT video card would be fantastic - those video cards were the fastest text kids on the block (scroll about 600k characters per second at 160x60 on 1600x1200 framebuffer). XFree86 from 2004 works fine, but a web browser would have to run on a faster box and export the display (which would be cheating). Old versions of Firefox are plenty fast enough, but will crash PDQ on many modern sites.
So really it'd be the modern web holding me back; too slow, bloated, and inefficient to run snappily on pretty much anything short of a 4GHz+ multicore with 8Gb or more of RAM and at least 100Mb ADSL.
Think I'll go cry into a paper tape reader now....
- sbierwagen 5y ago>Any 486 would definitely do it... Starting to get to the point where there's a DVI output DVI on a 486? Were there any ISA video cards with DVI out?
- VilleO 5y agoThere was motherboards with PCI for 486.
- TessierLabs 5y agoNot that I'm aware of but there were certainly 486 and 586 motherboards with PCI [0]. Support tended to be spotty though, to this dsay I haven't been able to find a 100MBps PCI NIC that'll work in a 486 PCI slot. [0] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=486+with+pci+slots&hl=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjX8rLLwNXxAhXFolwKHdybABkQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1316&bih=1190 https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=486+with+pci+slots&hl=en&s...
- rahen 5y agoI've built an 8088 "PC" replica with modern components on a backplane architecture (try searching "Xi 8088"). It's an interesting machine to build and play with, and you can definitely run Linux on it with ELKS.
- Nursie 5y agoCould you run Linux on a 286? Back in the day I remember there being a project called “elks”, the embedabble Linux kernel, which attempted to achieve that, but it wasn’t a ‘full’ Linux IIRC. (Edit - looks like ELKS is still with us, primarily aimed at 8086 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embeddable_Linux_Kernel_Subset https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embeddable_Linux_Kernel_Subs... )
- zh3 5y ago386 was the first x86 linux would run on (because the 286 memory management was...interesting). We did plenty of custom systems on linux 0.99/1.01, typically with 386/16's and 4Mb RAM (seeing off quite a few SCO-based setups in the process).
- grishka 5y agoDoesn't Linux require an MMU for virtual memory, which the 286 doesn't have iirc?
- txdv 5y agowow, an 7600GT sounds like overkill for a p3, I remember I bought a p3 with a geforce 2 and later upgraded to geforce 4, but did not experience too much of an uplift, because the cpu was the limiting factor
- zh3 5y agoFor graphics mode, certainly - but for plain text/framebuffer CPU is much less of a factor and I've never found anything faster that a 7600GT.