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Looks like it can even run Windows 96. Incredibly cool. I'll have to try if it runs my old Slackware kernal 1.2.13 some time. I used it with a 4MiB, 25Mhz 386 D
by weinzierl 1mo ago
Looks like it can even run Windows 96. Incredibly cool. I'll have to try if it runs my old Slackware kernal 1.2.13 some time. I used it with a 4MiB, 25Mhz 386 DX back in the time, so it should.
- fifilura 1mo ago(slackware) Just need to find where you stored all 20 floppy disks...
- weinzierl 1mo agoI think it came with two 3.5" disks, a bootdisk and a rootdisk, as well as two CDs. One was the actual distro, the other a sunsite mirror. At least that is what I remember and while that memory might be hazy I know exactly where my precious is.
- rwmj 1mo agoI definitely remember installing it off 20+ floppies onto a 386 back in the day. Most of the disks contained packages and you didn't need to install all of them though.
- jalk 1mo agoIIRC Emacs took up a significant number of disks
- gamedna 1mo agoEarly releases of Slackware were only floppy. The boot/root CD release came later. I fondly recall wasting hours in a computer lab @ university using 20 Sun Sparcstation 2 floppy drives to write the slackware floppies for me and my friend. Walking out with a brick of floppies was pure bliss (achievement unlocked).
- xhrpost 1mo agoDid not realize that Win95 can technically run on a 20Mhz 386DX.
- weinzierl 1mo agoGood question. I ran Slackware Linux and DOS 5.0 on mine. I think Win95 was my Pentium 100 MHz already so it sounds a bit sus, but the FAQ section of OP had items about Win95, that is where I got the idea from.
- badsectoracula 1mo agoIt "technically" can - i used Win95 on an AMD 386DX with 4MB of RAM back in the 90s for a little. Most of the time was spent waiting for the computer to do something while the HDD was constantly working. The Pentium MMX with 32MB i replaced it with was MUCH faster, practically everything was instant.
- glitchc 1mo agoYup, the RAM was the main bottleneck. 8MB was the minimum for Win9x, 16MB and above led to a fast experience.
- nullsmack 1mo agoI tried installing it on my 20mhz 486 IBM but the install never would finish even though the minimum specs listed 386. I always thought that was being too generous. I did use it on faster 486's at some point in school (I think 66mhz or faster?)
- st_goliath 1mo ago> Win95 can technically run on a 20Mhz 386DX s/technically/allegedly/ supposedly with a minimum of 4M RAM even! [1] I have a machine with twice that clock and twice that RAM that a friends parents wanted to toss out[2]. I spent the better part of a day getting Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3 to run. Playing around with it for a bit, I highly doubt that Windows 95 on minimum requirements would be anything but endlessly frustrating. I was not masochistic enough to try. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#System_requirements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#System_requirements [2] https://goliath32.com/hw/machines.html#pc386 https://goliath32.com/hw/machines.html#pc386
- ilaksh 1mo agoI don't know if they have some kind of magically genius caching system but the chip only has 512kb of SRAM and a little cache and the rest has to be managed by flash memory which is like 30+ times slower so I dunno about the performance of that.
- Narishma 1mo agoThe boards using this chip typically have 8 MB of PSRAM from what I've seen.
- ilaksh 1mo agoyeah but the PSRAM is going to cause a delay
- dark-star 1mo agoit's not that bad. At 120MHz, the PSRAM still gets only around 90-100ns per word in the worst case. If you use some SRAM for caching and do bulk transfers, you can get that down quite a bit. Also you can easily overclock the PSRAM to 133MHt (10 decrease in latency) with no problem, maybe even (much?) more. normal dynamic RAM back then was at 60-70 ns so it's really not that bad. And YT videos show that it also works fine in practice