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The Last i486 Online
- jaywalk 5y agoWell, it was the last i486 online. All it took was posting it on HN.
- Daunk 5y agoCame looking for this comment, heh.
- projektfu 5y agoIf they put cloudflare in front, would it still be right?
- willcipriano 5y agoYou could put one of those tiny embedded microcontrollers behind cloudflare and it would be alright, provided the site is static. You might need a pro plan, but with the right cache headers each cloudflare origin would hit you once then serve many requests with that response.
- moltke 5y agoHeh yeah, you don't even need to do TLS.
- mike_d 5y agoIf they put any CDN in front of it. Or another web server hosted in a datacenter. Cloudflare isn't anything unique or special aside from getting a bunch of VC funding so they could make the entry level plan free. Historically CDNs didn't do this because most sites don't need it, and abuse was common. However it clearly worked out for them in community name recognition.
- grishka 5y agoCloudflare is special because it regularly pisses me off with its captchas that feel like actual work to prove my humanity or, even worse, outright non-bypassable "this website uses Cloudflare to protect itself from online attacks". I don't know how good of a CDN it is, but its reputation in my eyes is "something that meddles with my web browsing for no good reason when I least expect it".
- freitasm 5y agoCloudflare will only block inbound traffic in two situations: - if the request contains an exploit (the Cloudflare WAF) - if the website owner created a rule to block a request Most of the "this website uses Cloudflare to protect..." is a consequence of the second one. To make things easier Cloudflare has a switch to automate the second one - basically it just looks at IP threat levels based on honeypot services all around. Visitors receive a "level" based on IP, region, browser version, etc and if the level is above the switch (Low, High, Medium) then it's blocked. People go for this option - set the switch to High and block almosty everything. Other people will set it to Low or Off and then create their own firewall rules - for example a website owner can create a complex set of rules (in addition to the Cloudflare WAF exploit, or replacing it). See https://community.cloudflare.com/t/the-firewall-rules-we-follow/308849 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/the-firewall-rules-we-fol... for an example. People will see the page sayng "Cloudflare blocked you" when in fact was most likely the website owner.
- freitasm 5y agoAny CDN. They just need to set the cache header right - or set to cache everything.
- ibic 5y agoFound this hilarious XD..
- Sohcahtoa82 5y agoRight? A 486 running a webserver behind CloudFlare returning a 502 Bad Gateway was the perfect "I don't know what I expected" moment.
- major505 5y agoIt was the same when someone posted a web server running on a Sinclair zx81
- porbelm 5y agoDid it explode
- maxicarlos08 5y agoYes
- eljimmy 5y agoWell now I feel compelled to install a web server on mine. I've got a fully functional i486DX2 66Mhz, though the PSU is a little shoddy. Maybe we can create an old school banner network linking all these old computers together :D
- zhte415 5y ago(2021) And it's still online in 2022! http://last486.online/status http://last486.online/status
- CrzyLngPwd 5y agoThat didn't last long :-(
- zinekeller 5y agoHmm? It loads fine for me.
- codetrotter 5y agoPage loads fine for me
- Tepix 5y agoKinda neat. However i'm pretty sure there are still quite a few i386's online somewhere in the production department of various companies. The 80386 was produced until 2007, just like the 80486 and even the much more recent Core Duo! It outlived the Pentium, which was only produced until 1999, the Pentium II (-2001) and the Pentium III (-2002).
- yummypaint 5y agoI still use a cnc milling machine controlled by a 386. The only way to load gcode is via manual entry or floppy. However, it still gets the job done just fine for 90% of my needs.
- snek_case 5y agoThere's probably a way to fit an SD card or flash drive in a floppy emulator? I'm curious now. Is that a 386 PC? Does it boot off of a small hard drive?
- Sakos 5y agoThere are adapters that let you use SD cards in place of floppy or IDE drive.
- genewitch 5y agocompactflash is nearly pin compatible with ATA, i had several laptops repurposed as home routers with CF cards on little adapters. I could probably dig one out and take a picture. edit: shoot, i think i meant IDE, not ATA
- Apreche 5y agoAn Apple ||gs getting online is pretty commonplace, so a 486 isn't that impressive or rare. Definitely far from the last.
- danuker 5y ago> It seemed that the ancient lan card was able to transmit packets but not able to receive. > After some inspection with a scope we found out that the RX trace after the transformer was missing / corroded and a patch was needed. A quick fix was to solder a wire and voila we we able to receive an IP address using the mTCP packet software for DOS and the DHCP client that comes with mTCP Mad debugging skillz!
- leeter 5y agoMe: "Surely the Linux Kernel has build options for x86 that includes no-FPU" 20 minutes later: "Oh right they removed i386 as a target because it sucked and wasn't maintained that includes i486... so now you'd have to target a Pentium or higher" But seriously the Linux kernel does support not having an FPU... just not on x86 as best I can tell.
- amluto 5y agoThe Linux kernel has an x87 emulator.
- leeter 5y agoIt does... and doing a quick search of the kernel source it's not actually used for anything I can't find it referenced outside of itself. There is FPU emulation for m68K that is, but x87 is not.
- cesarb 5y ago> and doing a quick search of the kernel source it's not actually used for anything I can't find it referenced outside of itself. It's being used here: https://lxr.missinglinkelectronics.com/linux+v5.16/arch/x86/kernel/traps.c#L1187 https://lxr.missinglinkelectronics.com/linux+v5.16/arch/x86/... Whenever the kernel gets a "device not available" exception, and CONFIG_MATH_EMULATION is set (which is the case when the kernel is compiled for a 486SX), and the CPU does not have a real FPU, and the "emulation" flag on CR0 is set, it calls the FPU emulator.
- leeter 5y agoGood to know I was looking in the wrong spot, I was looking for what looked like the most likely header other parts of the code would be using.
- amluto 5y agoAh, you got faked out. The kernel doesn’t really use FPU even in modern CPUs. The emulation is for userspace’s benefit, not the kernel’s
- compsciphd 5y agonot anymore :) (as of 13:22 UTC), though I expect it will come back. eventually.
- UncleSlacky 5y agoThere's still a Sinclair ZX81 online: http://zx81-siggi.zx-team.org/index.html http://zx81-siggi.zx-team.org/index.html (previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25638936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25638936) and a Commodore 64: https://www.tfe.c64.org/ https://www.tfe.c64.org/
- deltarholamda 5y agoWay to go, you just set fire to a Sinclair and a Commodore, you monster.
- forum_ghost 5y agonot anymore. both links down.
- ForOldHack 5y ago"That was a priceless Steinway." "Not anymore." - Inspector Clouseau.
- ForOldHack 5y agoThere used to be a Mac Plus on the internet ( 8Mhz 68000 ) called Camneerg, or Green mac backwards, at L0ft. "BTW, this Mac Plus is runing the web server you are reading this page from right now." Its still up. https://www.spacerogue.net/Camneerg/Camneerg.html https://www.spacerogue.net/Camneerg/Camneerg.html
- bartread 5y agoAnd, amazingly after this post, it's still up.
- CrzyLngPwd 5y agoGot any more we can DDoS? :-)
- classichasclass 5y agoYeah, you lot wreck my poor little Alpha Micro Eagle 300 (68030) every time it gets posted here. It's like you like these old beasts or something. ;)
- robin_reala 5y agoNow that I think about it, my first visit to the Internet was on a 486 (though I’d been using the same machine to access BBSes beforehand). I guess that’d be the same for a bunch of people here.
- BobMcBob 5y agoYep, same here. Rocked a Packard Bell 486DX2 66mhz, with 8MB Ram, and a 400MB HDD. Came with a 14,4kbps modem that I upgraded to 33.6kbps. BBSes from the free newspapers is what got me "online" and eventually I was able to PPP over WinSock to get my Windows 3.11 on to the REAL internet. I miss those times. Nothing like spending hours downloading a few early MP3s in 94-95, and having to play them back at 1/2 or 1/4 quality because the 486 couldn't keep up (and even then running out of cache 60-70 seconds in and paused for it catch back up).
- kingcharles 5y ago> Nothing like spending hours downloading a few early MP3s in 94-95, and having to play them back at 1/2 or 1/4 quality because the 486 couldn't keep up (and even then running out of cache 60-70 seconds in and paused for it catch back up). LOL. I used to have to decompress them into 40MB WAV files to play them. My whole hard drive was 50MB.
- justsomehnguy 5y agoAm486DX4/100 couldn't run 44k/Stereo, but at 22k it would play it in a ... single mode (Win9x with WinAmp) and at 11k you could even try to do something easy, like writing text in Notepad. Though I preferred to just play MIDIs and do my things.
- gattilorenz 5y agoDown for me, but you can still see the content on archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20220316115827/http://last486.online/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220316115827/http://last486.onl...
- wumms 5y agoAnother one [0] (discussed 2 month ago [1]) [0] http://486servu.dy.fi/ http://486servu.dy.fi/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29959129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29959129
- kjs3 5y agoThanks for that. Never heard of the lEEt/OS that this one is running but looks like an interesting toy.
- deepspace 5y agoI still remember when the engineering company I worked at obtained its first 486 PC - through acquisition of another company, no less. We reverently talked about "the 486" and it was stored behind a locked door. Only the most CPU-intensive jobs would be deemed worthy of CPU time on the beast. And then the CAD department bought a whole bunch of 486s to do PCB layout, and the mystique was gone.
- jjkaczor 5y agoMy first job was working for a small retail/VAR shop - just me and my engineering-background boss/owner who specialized in CAD/CAM transitions for manufacturing. (Plus blueprint scanning/digitalization and vector conversion) Our very first order came in for an i486 - so excited, I grabbed all the components, headed into the backroom and built the machine. Once it was all together - I eagerly threw the power switch on... Darkness... the breaker blew, the lights were out... Well... turns out, I had rotated the CPU 180 degrees from it's required position. OMG... here I am a teenager and now I am going to have to pay for a $1200+ part? My boss calmly reseated the CPU correctly, and... it worked! We did a 5-day burn-in/benchmark with no problems, and never had any callbacks from the customer.
- dpwm 5y ago> Well... turns out, I had rotated the CPU 180 degrees from it's required position. OMG... here I am a teenager and now I am going to have to pay for a $1200+ part? I did something similar with an i486 DX4-100; I wasn’t so lucky: the power supply held up, the CPU smoked and it took out the motherboard. Thankfully this was well into the Pentium-II era, but it was still pretty devastating. If I recall correctly, it just slotted in the wrong way like it was meant to go; I guess modern CPU sockets have fixed that.
- mywittyname 5y ago> I guess modern CPU sockets have fixed that. Kinda. All that's stopping you from inserting a Ryzen CPU wrong way around is a 0.3mm copper pin that exists in one corner, but not the other. So there's still that worry of, "should I force it because it needs a bit of force, or should I not force it because I'll break it?" I think Core CPUs are the same way.
- RoboRy 5y agoHackerNews crushes "the last" 486, then proceeds to smash all the other machines posted in the comments. It's like the day of reckoning for cute old hardware.
- johnklos 5y agoWe shall see ;) http://elsie.zia.io/ http://elsie.zia.io/
- smm11 5y agoI'm tempted to post the address of my DEC running NeXT ...
- ForOldHack 5y agoWe could easily melt that down too.
- sgt 5y agoIt would literally turn into soup.
- ck2 5y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20220316115827/http://last486.online/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220316115827/http://last486.onl... http://google.com/search?q=cache:http://last486.online/ http://google.com/search?q=cache:http://last486.online/ (not saved/working http://archive.today/http://last486.online/ http://archive.today/http://last486.online/ )
- rkagerer 5y agoMakes me want to get my old 8088 XT out and hack it into the web.
- dehrmann 5y agoI wonder what a Vortex86SX counts as. It's not Intel, it's closer to a Pentium, but lack a FPU.
- dehrmann 5y agoIt's nowhere near as impressive, but I kept a PII running as a server for a very long time. The Pentium Pro-PIII era was an interesting time because USB had just shown up, PCI was commonplace, FPUs and SIMD were now standard. Many x86 Linux builds target i686, so it's the the oldest PC you can reasonably run modern Linux on without much hassle.
- zozbot234 5y agoI'm pretty sure that modern software projects like Firefox need special patches to work on PIII-era hardware. The Debian versions of Firefox for i686 do include these patches, so they ought to work provided that the system has enough RAM.
- runjake 5y agoWe have a SPARC IPX online (albeit firewalled from the Internet) doing production tasks for $reasons. It's been online since about 1992. The hard drive sounds like a metal grinder. Anyone else have an IPX or older online for non-novelty purposes? Edit: 30 years now!
- sgt 5y agoI ran a SparcStation 5 until about 2006. About 30 users.
- mkovach 5y agoI use to run an uptime server (http://uptime.openacs.org http://uptime.openacs.org) and a tiny url server (http://myturl.com http://myturl.com) on an old SparcStation pizza box until 2006, when the final hard drive I was going to buy for the best finally dead.
- sgt 5y agoThat's hilarious. I also ran a tiny URL server off my SS5. Nowadays that service would have been cloud based and cost $1k/mo in AWS costs for the same amount of users.
- TedShiller 5y agoIt’s offline
- kloch 5y agoBack in January 2000 I set up an Atari 800 as a web server with a 3com CS-210 terminal server as the TCP interface. The Atari had no problems keeping up with several requests per second even after being Slashdotted since all of the expensive TCP stuff was offloaded. There was a 16-bit hit counter on the page that overflowed and the CS-210 would crash after a day or so but otherwise it worked surprisingly well. https://kevinloch.com/atari/ https://kevinloch.com/atari/
- yazantapuz 5y agoIt's dead, Jim.