The 80486...
 

Hi all on the forum.
I am posting this from my 486DX/33 with 24 MB of RAM and running Windows 3.11!
Its running suprisingly well today. I tried to post this from Links2 on Linux but it is a huge
memory pig and would promptly trigger the OOM killer. Then I tried to build retawk for Linux
which uses a lot less RAM but doesn't support SSL without openSSL or GNUtls (I think it was) and
I could not get those to build with uClibc.

Opera 3.60 in win 3.11 works suprisingly well for what it is though

Hi there,

cool, wow! Did you raid a museum? ;-)
Using what browser?

Oh, I suppose that answers my question above.
I find that post very interesting because I still have a small single-board PC here, a 486/133 with 32MB RAM. I'm very eager to put it to some use again and I was searching for a suitable Linux distro or components. I played a bit with Tiny Core, but it wouldn't even boot on that biscuit PC. My next Idea was to put together syslinux, a minimalistic 2.6 kernel and a busybox for starters and see what that combo can do (but I haven't yet got around to actually trying). After all, that little board has four TTY ports and might act as some kind of "intelligent multiple TTY unit".
Anyway, I don't intend to run a desktop or a GUI of any kind on this biscuit, just the kernel and very few services.

[X] Doc CPU

Still on it!
Actually I bought it on ebay. And with the purchase price, shipping and upgrades
I spend more than I care to say. But since the first computer that my parents bought me was a 486 was back in the early
2000s, I have a soft spot for these things.
Browser is Opera 3.60. It renders decently, but gives a lot of "Invalid Certificate" errors and sometimes
only renders part of the page requiring a refresh. Not that hard to crash either.

Well the "distro" I run on it was completely built from source because prebuilt distros
were just not really cutting it. I can provide builds of the kernel, initrd, configuration files,
tips or anything like that if you want. Most things will run ok, but the RAM is going to be your limiting factor.

My 486 machine happend to have an Eithernet card which is really nice because that way
it can go on the network very easily. It transfers data at 100-150KB/s so it is tolerable even with
file downloads unlike SLIP
[X] Doc CPU[/QUOTE]

Heh ... I still am using such a system (in packet-radio amateur service) running Gentoo Linux.

When running Windows 3.11, the machine ... well, felt "old." But when all the "cruft" was stripped away, this machine was ... (is!!) ... downright fast! :D

24Mb of RAM??? Luxury :)

I'm tempted to resurrect some of my old gear now. I still have DOS 6 / Windows 3.11 on a VM and I spin it up every now and then for a history lesson :)

Modern operating systems are just plain wasteful.
The biggest limiting factor at this point is probably the 504 MB hard drive limitation in the BIOS.

I upgraded it from 8MB which was too easily depleted
A VM just isn't the same

Heh heh, you're probably safe from malware too, because Win 3.11 is too old to run them! I don't have my 386 any more, but still fire up DOS/Win 3.1 in a VM every now and then, but I haven't tried to run IE whatever it was back then.

Totally agree, which is why I'm getting more and more motivated to dig some of the stuff out the attic piles. Although I think the 486 systems were disposed off in one of the "great purges", I know I've Pentium II and Pentium III gear around though.

The old redhaT 5.2 would run on it. It's in the archives.

It probably would. The difficult part is no internal cdrom

If you would like both a challenge (mostly in finding a copy) and a huge wake up call at just how badly Microsoft has sabotaged the progress of computing, get and install IBM's OS/2. Version 2.1 is written almost entirely in Assembly with the 386 in mind and is therefore extremely efficient and scaleable. It will run unbelievably snappy on that box, plus it has vastly superior

1) File System - HPFS (essentially NTFS as MS stole it)
2) CPU scheduling
3) Memory management - direct addressing, not EMS
4) Pre-emptive process management
5) TCP/IP stack

It also handles larger file sizes and smaller segments and is fully Posix compatible.

Even better would be Warp 3 for it's addition of greater hardware support and more usable modern applications, along with a Desktop arguably better than Win95 but still capable of screaming on a 486 with 24MB ram. At last look, one can still download Maintenance (Service Packs on steroids) and iirc there were 30 or so of those for Warp 3, and around 20 for 2.1, although the originals are exceptional all by themselves.

I remember having to write code for OS/2 Warp. You could write in "MS" C and then the MS C compiler could compile for each platform separately.

Hi there,

that doesn't match my recollection. Back in the early to mid-90's, I actually purchased OS/2 2.1 and used it for a while. It worked, alright, but it was unbearably slow and heavy-footed on the good old 386 (with 4MB RAM, IIRC) I used at that time. The desktop (called PM, short for Presentation Manager) was a pain in the ass, and the system rarely worked more than two hours without a serious crash.
Snappiness and reliability up to a point is what I had when I reverted to my illegal copy of Windows 3.1 and decided to leave the OS/2 floppies on the shelf just as an alibi.

Just to be fair: Okay, Windows 3.x didn't have an efficient file system of its own, just FAT16 inherited from DOS. It neither had true preemptive multitasking among Windows applications (that was first introduced in Windows 4.x), but it did have its own memory management with direct adressing of up to 16MB, though still limited to 16bit offset addresses (64kB per segment). And of course it didn't have a TCP/IP protocol stack - what for at that time? Networking was only just entering the scope of private and small office use, the most popular protocol being Novell's IPX/SPX, obsoleted by Microsoft's NetBIOS a bit later.

And please don't forget that OS/2 was initially a joint development of Microsoft and IBM, only the Microsoft guys were smart enough to drop out of the project early enough and let IBM handle the debris, when they became aware that it was leading into a dead end. However, this ancestry is the reason for Windows having an OS/2 compatibility layer all the time, at least until Windows 5. I'm not sure if they dropped it in the meantime.

[X] Doc CPU

Wow! That is totally amazing and mysterious. I actually bought it too and I actually admin'd a small business with just shy of 50 workstations running 2.1 and there was not one single unscheduled reboot in over 2 years.

I'll talk about speed in a minute but right now I am absolutely flabberghasted at the idea that OS/2 was anything short of a Rock of Gibraltar. One of the main reasons Microsoft bailed was because IBM refused to allow exceptions for certain programs to have direct access to hardware. MS-OS2 3.0 NT became MS Windows NT with such access (and a trumped up story about a former DEC employee being responsible for NTFS) and the BSOD was born. IBM could not allow such silliness since OS/2 was in use not only in Enterprise, including Banking, where downtime can cost many millions of dollars, but also in Hospitals and Air Traffic Control where crashes and Blue Screens of Death become literal!!

So I don't know how you managed to mess that up but I assure you, you did, even if only by having poor hardware. OS/2 2.1 was my first gui, excepting DOS shells, and I paid for Warp 3, Warp 4, and Warp Server for e-Business and tossed and turned over eComStation. I have spent thousands of hours in it and never witnessed anything like you recollect. I was a part of TeamOS2 and frequented clubs, forums, BBS's and IRC channels and never heard anything remotely like this - just the opposite (excepting the huge amount of FUD Microsoft shoveled out).

Regarding speed - OS/2 was designed originally when there were 4 levels of computers - Mainframes, Midis, Minis, and PCs - and IBM wanted an OpSys capable of running on all of them. As one might imagine coming from IBM it was extremely conservative and many complained about how strict it was, refusing to install on some kinds of ram and some CPU's caching. Often one had to turn off L2 caching to complete the install only to turn it back on again after and all worked fine. Additionally wait states and many other speed related settings in the config.sys were set extremely low in the interest of compatibility and stability. I bought the Clear & Simple suite which nicely complemented documentation with programs to test and tweak performance settings. I'm sorry yours was slow. Mine have always screamed.


I will grant you that Microsoft had vision that SOHO desktops were likely a huge and untapped market, a vision that IBM neither saw nor cared about, but to say that Microsoft saw a dead end is ludicrous. This vision, plus the fact as someone so aptly put it, that if IBM bought out a sushi business they would market it as "raw, dead fish", and also lack of unity within IBM (partly since a sizable portion of revenue became servicing NT machines) because a second time they got hornswoggled by Billy and the Boys. The embarrassment was felt amongst a lot of management types who didn't listen nor care that OS/2 was technically superior if it couldn't beat out Microsoft.

To be fair, Microsoft did manage one truly great influence on the direction of OS/2. Version 1 was all about the 286 because at the time 386's were so expensive IBM assumed they would never reach enough numbers to bring that cost down. As I said, IBM couldn't fathom the burgeoning PC market as MS did. So one of the reasons v2 was so great was embracing the 386 with all 3 modes - real, protected, and virtual. Thank you Microsoft..... but.....

Compatibility layer? Win95 and Win98 installers were designed and built with the specific means to detect HPFS and issue dire but vague warnings that "the install may fail" and then kindly offered to delete "the problem". The only "compatibility" there has been on the MS side is to this day many systems will mistakenly identify NTFS as HPFS because they changed so little, despite the ridiculous cover story.

You may dismiss all the above as the rantings of a crazed fanboy but that won't explain why IBM agreed to extend support an additional 5 years on top of the original 5 on Warp4 and it's derivatives because of all the furor raised by Mission Critical clients who had nowhere else to go for such reliability. Official IBM support did not end until 2006. Then eComStation took over.

Incidentally, FWIW, if you doubt Win95 and Win98 were inferior in so many ways, I should add that I have OS/2 Warp 4 running on this Azrock A77 Extreme with a 4-core i5-3550 and 8 Gigs of ram. They cannot be forced to even install under any circumstances and Warp screams since even v2.1 was designed to handle SCSI devices and multiple CPUs/Cores and 8 Gigs of ram (later, 64 Gigs of ram). Win 95 and Win 98 won't run even on a 32bit CPU with in excess of 1Gig of ram.

So my recommendation still stands and if OP is successful (and it won't be easy) he can post back and say whether he finds it faster, slower or more or less reliable. If you do though, PLEASE do not use Fat16. Use HPFS.

The problem was that the average 486 had 4 to 8 MB RAM.

Even if in some ways it was better. The software availability just isn't there

Windows 3.0/3.1 doesn't have a TCP stack, but Windows 3.11 DOES
Its performance is manageable albeit somewhat worse than Linux on the same hardware

Actually that was not a huge obstacle since it would run on a 386 with 4MB of ram. Also it is not an issue at all for OP who says he has 24MB RAM.

While 2.1 was quite barebones, Warp 3, especially if one had a CDROM to take advantage of the Bonus Pak, had considerably more software applications built in than Windows 3 and the TCP/IP stack was vastly superior to Win 3.11's primitive mess. One was expected to use NetBios, NetBui, and other crapola protocols instead. Even WinXPs TCP/IP stack was inferior to Warp 3s and by the time Warp 4 hit the gulf was even larger, which should have been quite an embarrassment since it shipped in 1996.

I didn't mention Warp4 before because frankly I can't recall from experience how well it would run on OP's 486 w/ 24MB RAM. It came with substantially more applications built in even than Win95 and Win98, having

1) A complete Office Suite tho not as polished as MS Office, it was essentially free and did have such advanced features as Mobile Office that synced remote systems with any main system.
2) Internet Dialer
3) Lotus Notes
4) Voice Dictation and Navigation
5) NetInfinity with DesktopManagementInterface was a total systems package that made Control Panel look like a toy.
6) WebExplorer Browser and Netscape Navigator
7) The best Java support of any OpSys until 2010

In addition it had what was called The Universal Client, supporting LAN Server, Warp Server, Windows NT Server, Novell Netware, Netware Directory Services, PCLAN Program, IPX-SPX, LANtastic for DOS or OS/2, Warp Connect, Windows NT Workstation, Windows 95, Windows for Workgroups, TCP/IP (including DHCP, DDNS, FTP, TFTP, Telnet, SLIP, PPP, SMTP, and SNMP), SNA, NetBIOS) all of which could work simultaneously !

On the downside, I could never understand IBMs commitment to Object Programming and what passed for a file manager was terribly clunky to most users. I bought Clear and Simple's suite of tools which IIRC cost me $25 US and included an excellent File Manager as well as many other valuable tools like performance analyzers and optimizers.

Also, by 1997 Warp Centric BBS's and especially the University sponsored Hobbes website ( http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/ still alive and well to this day) began to host IBM addons and also a great deal of user generated software much like the Linux community does today. In fact, one larger project, called EMX, basically brought *Nix into OS/2 and I ran an Enlightenment Desktop for years on Warp 4 and WSeB.

Hi there,

so obviously our experience with OS-half is significantly different.

That's not an acceptable conclusion. Let's make it clear that you're talking about a "feature" in Windows NT3.x, because the consumer version of Windows 3.x didn't have this, it wasn't even a true self-contained OS (the mainstream branch of Windows was a full OS only as of version 4, known as Windows 95).
Anyway, the vast majority of Bluescreens I encountered during my Windows experience weren't caused by applications requesting privileged access to memory or hardware, but by drivers - very often Microsoft's own ones. And, hey, I encountered an awful lot of Bluescreens, most of them with NT4.

Possibly. However, it was a perfectly normal standard PC featuring a true Intel 386/25MHz, 4MB RAM, a 120MB IDE hard disk, and a TSENG ET4000 based VGA, all of which OS/2 claimed to support out of the box, with no need for extra drivers. But I dimly remember that I encountered the first crash of OS/2 even during installation, and when I phoned a fellow student (the one who'd made me aware of OS/2 and was using it since 1.3), he told me to just try again, start over again. The second time it installed fine, apparently, but as I said earlier it never came anywhere near stability. If this really had to do with "poor hardware", as you ponder, why would the DOS/Windows combo run so smoothly and almost faultlessly?

As for the sluggish operation, I guess that 4MB RAM, although up to the specs, was actually not enough to run smoothly. Most of the time, the system was busy swapping in and out, so that response to a user action often occurred with a delay of several seconds.

Oh, and by the way: Over the years, I installed and used almost every version from 3.1 to XP on many machines, and over time I had a very clear image that there were versions that ran rock stable, and others that would crash if you only raised your voice. The most stable and reliable versions (in decreasing order) seemed to be 2000/SP4, XP/SP2 and 98; versions I've never seen stable were NT4, XP prior to SP2, 95 and ME (in no particular order), though ME was actually a stripped-down variant of Windows 98 with a slightly pimped GUI.

I wasn't talking about compatibility to the HPFS file system - there isn't any. I was referring the the Windows API that has (or had?) a number of system calls explicitly for compatibility with OS/2. I don't know what this was good for, because I doubt that any Windows version was really able to run native OS/2 applications. The other way round worked, I know.

Windows 98 does. That requires some tricks, but it does.
There's a bug in smartdrv, the HDD cache management in Windows 98 with the effect that smartdrv claims a huge amount of memory if there's a total of more than 256MB. Then Windows 98 complains about "not enough memory". You can work around this by manually specifying a decent cache size for smartdrv in Windows's system.ini file. I had Windows 98 running well on a 2GB machine until I retired it about two or three years ago.

[X] Doc CPU

Thank you Doc_CPU that was an interesting post. I especially was fascinated by the workaround for the 1GB limit for Win98. Nice one! Also I can't call it a typo since it was really just a brain freeze but I'd like to correct the error regarding Win95 & 98. I wrote 32bit but I really did mean to write 64bit. I am all too aware of the joke about "32 bit extension and graphical interface on a 16bit patch" and ending in "not 1 bit of competition". We did used to joke that it was a "32 bit pretender" but they will not even begin to boot on a 64 bit CPU and OS/2 does happily and even loves it if you have multi-cores and can read and write to multiple SCSI drives simultaneously.

BTW not to put too fine a point on it but technically BSODs can only occur on NT. On Win3 through 98 it was commonly a Page Fault or most common the General Protection Fault. But, you're right that people rarely make that distinction anymore. Even I had forgotten it's name for a bit until I remembered a jpeg floating around Freenode channels of the MS Win95 Keyboard which only had 3 keys - Ctrl, Alt and Delete - "for when you can't wait 5 minutes for a General Protection Fault" :D

Also you may possibly be correct about my conclusion because I got that from IBM employees working on TeamOS2. Not all were shall we say stable and reasonable chaps. In any case, as expected, even the Official IBM version is quite different from the Official Microsoft Version. However I must say that in truth I found IBM to be more honest about this. Steve Ballmer is quoted in print and on video saying "IBM paid by the kloc" and implied they only cared about quantity not quality. He just neglected to mention they paid by the QUALIFIED, ACCEPTED kloc. This rather burns me up since it denigrates some of the finest coders of the dawn of the personal computer days. IBM may not have great marketing skills but they do know who to hire and generally get them.

I am seriously still trying to comprehend what could have possibly caused you such problems. I was such a noob when I first tried to install OS/2 2.1 that I actually tried to install it on a 386 system with a CGA monitor and an MFM hard drive and even that got part way through installation before halting, but the installer never crashed. As you might imagine I installed various versions of OS/2 on many hundreds of computers and I really did never see one actually crash, as in instant reboot. If hardware or drivers were a problem one would get a message that "Install Can Not Continue" but that is not a crash.

Someone else mentioned a scarcity of applications and I never experienced that either. I did, however, have considerable problems with device drivers... not crashing, just availability. I naively began learning Assembly so I could write my own.

Anyway thanks for the convo... this has been fun. :)

OH! I ALMOST FORGOT!! Today I traveled to Floyd, Virginia, a deceptively sleepy little town that is home to an amazing Computer Museum. It is run by a man named Dave Larsen, who was a colleague of Jon Titus who, while a student at Virginia Tech, built the very first home computer, pre-dating the Altair by almost 6 months. You can see it here If You're Interested

I saw a working Altair, a Sinclair, a Mark 8 Mini, several Tandys, a bunch of Apples (although he won't display any of the Apple I's he has as they are worth around $300K each. There are only something like 45 of them still in existence.) and many I had never even heard of. All of you posting in this thread would have loved it and I thought of this at the time.

Cool museum. I am on the wrong side of the country though

Hi there,

yea, thank you, but that's not my merit. I picked that up in a computer magazine at a time when Windows 98 was still common, but computers with more than 256MB were also coming up. Could be sometime very shortly past 2000.

You're saying that Win98 won't run on a 64bit CPU? Well, I might try some day, just out of curiosity. I'd be very surprised, 'cause usually it is said that the 64bit CPUs are backward compatible. I've been running 32bit versions of Linux on two of my machines for years, because I simply didn't know the Atom 230 CPU is 64bit capable. After all, Windows 2000 (32bit only) and the 32bit version of XP run fine on a 64bit CPU, so why not Win98 ...

In Germany, there's another nice joke about that.
Q: "How come Windows thinks it can do anything?"
A: "That's because of 32 Bit. When I have 32 Bit inside me, I also think I can do anything."
To understand this, one must know that there's a German beer brand called "Bitburger" (after the town Bitburg), which is colloquially called "Bit".
The motto of its commercial is "Bitte ein Bit!" ("A Bit, please!").

And its successors 2000, XP, Vista, Seven ...

I'm not. It's twenty years ago, it's long gone. No need to stir it up again on my behalf.

Well, at the installation problem the system just stalled and didn't respond any more, so all I could do after a few minutes was press the RESET button. The frequent crashes of the running system were either freezes, or the system would spontaneously reboot.

Would you believe me if I told you that my good old Commodore C64 is still working? At least it did when I tried it last year. I stowed it away in plastic wrap and a cardboard box, but sometimes I'm taking it out again for the sake of nostalgia. It's not much of use any more, since the floppy drive's bearings are slightly gummed meanwhile, and even if they weren't, many floppy disks themselves aren't readable any longer. I occasionally play a little game on a C64 emulator, though. :-)

[X] Doc CPU

Depends on how you define BSoD. For example serious faults will cause Windows 3.1 even to display
an error with white text on a blue background. The system may or may not hang

Yes. I mentioned that.... most commonly "GPF or General Protection Fault" not really the same as BSOD since occasionally a GPF still allowed recovery of the desktop w/o rebooting. BSOD is death.... a kernel dump and a reboot.

Because win98 is still a shell on DOS, a 16bit OpSys and one with almost all of the original limitations that Apple Lisa and OS/2 tried to get the computer world to upgrade past. I'm assuming your smartdrv trick worked because it could be called with the LOADHIGH switch, and even that surprises me. No editing of config.sys and autoexec.bat, nor hacking of msdos.sys and io.sys will allow MS-DOS to be booted on a 64bit system. AFAIK the problem is that command.com is 16bit.

Hi there,

no, it's not. It's neither a 16bit system, nor just something on top of DOS.

The 9x series of Windows (that's 95, 98 and ME) is a full-fledged 32bit system. It uses 32bit word width, it uses 32bit linear addressing. However, it can also run 16bit Windows and DOS applications. While 16bit Windows modules are executed through a wrapper called winoldap.mod, DOS applications are executed in V86 virtual mode, each DOS box in its own VM.

The widesread misconception that these systems are based on DOS may result from the fact that they use DOS as their bootloader. But it's really just that - once the Windows kernel takes over, Win9x is true 32bit and needs no DOS any more.

Your assumption is wrong. I wasn't talking about the DOS driver smartdrv.exe, but about its 32bit Windows counterpart, though they're both contained in the same executable file.

Wrong again. Just for curiosity's sake, I popped the Windows 98 setup CD in and booted DOS 7.1 from it - on a computer with an AMD X2/260 CPU, a genuine 64bit system. And it works. Q.e.d. Of course it doesn't support two cores, so it feels a bit like a Porsche that only runs in first gear.
However, I'm not trying to install Windows 98 on that computer now, because I know that one of the first thing setup will do is flatten the existing MBR and replacing it with its own, knocking my GRUB over. But I might do that in a few days on a small, clean HDD.

There are a few things that Windows 98 cannot cope with. One of them is HDDs larger than 160GB, another is an UEFI BIOS.

I also know that Windows 98 has no built-in drivers for SATA; that simply didn't exist in 1998. But it will work anyway, though slow, because it'll run the hard disk in "compatibility mode", which means Windows will use BIOS calls to access the HDD.

[X] Doc CPU

Maybe we are splitting hairs or have different definitions of "full-fledged" but there are more limitations to Win95 thru ME than just the initial bootloader. Anyone can see this by pressing F8 at boot time and selecting "step-by-step confirmation". Additionally, although MSCDEX was no longer required, SCSI hardware, many soundcards, and a few other peripherals still required entries in config.sys, autoexec.bat, or both. I'm not talking just about the primitive state of PNP at the time and mere IRQ/DMA assignment but rather base drivers at DOS 16 bit level... hardly "full".

I sincerely hope you do as I can't comment on how far the install CDROM will get before it balks and halts, but I have experienced these:

1) I have several SuperMicro 370SDA mobos which has a socket 370 which only supports 32 bit CPUs, however because it is at it's core a server board and was expected to run other systems not constrained by DOS 16bit, the mobo supports 3 GB of DDR RAM. If I remove 2GB, leaving 1GB installed, Win95 and Win98 will install and run. On 2GB it will sometimes boot but usually crash. On 3GB it simply will not boot.

2) I have 3 different 64 bit systems
a) Asus A8NE w/ AMD FX-57 2GB RAM
b) Intel DP45SG w/ Intel Core2 Extreme QX-9650 w/ 8GB RAM
c) Asrock Z77 Extreme w/ i3-3550 w/8GB RAM

On all 3 systems, regardless of amount of ram installed, any attempt to boot MS-DOS, Win95, or Win98 (I can't speak for Win-Me as I never had the displeasure of owning it) gives me a BIOS error message that such systems are incompatible with a 64bit CPU.

That said, LiveCDs, even those which have DOS programs on them will boot to menu. Some DOS programs will attempt to run, most will not even try and if more than 1GB of ram is installed, all will crash if they run at all.



They also won't handle 4GB files, even if one enhances them with NTFS support (incidentally loaded in autoexec.bat) and can only boot from the 1st active partition on the first hard drive. However there was a workaround for hard drives larger than 160GB iirc.

I'm not going to just assume and state "You're wrong" just because your research, experience, definitions and understanding may differ from mine but it is extremely odd that you had such terrible experience with IBM's OS/2 and such exemplary, even rule-breaking positive experience with Windows.

I eagerly await your results installing Win95, 98 or Me on a 64bit system.

PS - I also run 32 bit XP and Linuxes (in addition to OS/2) on the above 64bit machines. They work because they are in every sense of the word 32bit, not just partially.

Funny you should mention OS/2. I walked by a Wells Fargo ATM not long ago and ... "what to my wondering eyes did appear" but an OS/2 Program Manager screen?

I've also been asked to weigh-in on a point-of-sale terminal project whose technology ... installed in many hundreds of stores today right now, is apparently ... dBase or maybe FoxPro.

And, since we all seem to be "taking a ride on the Wayback Machine" here, let us all remember to keep very firmly(!) in mind that ... "history repeats itself, even when we remember ("BAH!! These Kids Today!™") ;) that history."

Everything that we do (or have ever done ...) in the world of software is, without exception, in Defiance™ (insert appropriate image-link here ...) against the limitations of the hardware of its time . . .

... Including: "2014 yessir you are n-o-t an exception," today.

I know for sure that my 64 bit capable core 2 duo will boot DOS. I accidentally left a DOS boot disk in a USB floppy drive
while a rebooting and I was greeted with an A:\ prompt

I never tried 95/98 though

As far as I know, the CPU itself should be backwards compatible all the way back to 808x series
The motherboard may be a different story

Over the years I've occasionally felt like there must actually be two versions of Windows in the world: One that runs pretty well, most of the time, and is fast enough to get things done, and another that got installed on most of the Windows systems I've had to deal with. This thread is another example of that phenomenon. I have two other theories to explain this:
(1) Windows has some kind of latent awareness, and has never liked me, even before I became a Linux user;
(2) "PC" hardware is extremely fragmented and buggy, so that a reliable signal on one box will sometimes get lost on a secend, almost identical box. If your setup happens (by random chance, possibly in your choice of manufacturer) to mostly match the systems used by Microsoft, then Windows will run fine; otherwise, you might as well give up now. Linux has more effective field testing, plus a lot of the drivers were reverse-engineered and hence tuned to the way hardware actually works, as opposed to the way it was intended to work - so those of us with Windowsphobic hardware still often get good results from Linux.

Back on topic, smeezekitty, have you tried Arachne for DOS on your 486? It was my favourite browser back in my 2/3/486 days. I still think it has the best browser UI I've ever used.

"Ol' Dobbin" is finally starting to break down for me, but this little laptop which was bought to run Windows 95 is still a surprisingly fast machine when running Gentoo. :D

The thing that I miss about the older equipment was that it was both smaller and simpler ... and, in my experience, often better-made. Microsoft, as Steve Jobs once put it, was "promiscuous" in its licensing of Windows, and there's just a lot of crap hardware out there running it.

Not the OP but as recently as a couple of years ago I used Arachne for DOS quite a bit on my Panasonic CF-01 (Am5x86 running at 133Mhz, 1.6 GB hard disk, 24 MB of RAM) and Opera 9.5* on Windows 95. Arachne was/is an impressive piece of work, at least to non-programmer like me.

I found it kind of slow (it was heavy on the disk access) and the lack of CSS support was a major downfall in rendering

Cigarette in one hand, mouse in the other - that's multitasking isn't it? :)
WRONG THREAD, BRIAN!!! Do one thing at once! Dozy old f...f...fellow!

Re Arachne
 

I did wonder how well Arachne had aged, until recently I hand't even noticed it had been updated. Shame about the CSS, still I'm glad at least one person still likes it. :)

Now I come to think of it, last time I used it it was as a 10-second-boot-to-internet solution on a Pentium, where it had a huge RAM disc so it could thrash to its heart's content.

Back in the day I was mostly excited about having a (then) up-to-date browser that didn't require Windows, though I liked the look & feel and the developer's attitude too. :cool:

@Pastychomper Someone ported Arachne to linux a few years ago. Somewhere in my pile of junk I've got an old laptop with a 3.7 Knoppix on it and Arachne. I don't remember using it much, I think a new "shiny bauble" came along and I lost interest. ;-)

As much fun as the '486 was, I still like the 6502 and the 8008. (Yeah, pack-rat that I am, I have one-or-more of each.)

It's great to see the interest in old technology and it is interesting that some older technologies have either never been improved upon, or even dropped with nothing better to replace them. We can actually see some of these on YouTube which hosts many videos of REALLY ancient stuff including, working demonstrations of Xerox Star, Vic 20, Apple 1, Lisa, Altair, and of course C64 and Amiga amongst many more. The Xerox Star is particularly interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q

I am starting a build on a PCI 486 now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaRMzlIpzvI

I have an old 486 computer. It was my uncle's when he was in high school. My grandfather had it in his office, I asked about it, and he let me have it.

No USB ports, not even a PS/2 port. A bit of Googling informed me that PS/2 keyboards are really AT keyboards with a different shape plug. I brought out the wire cutters, alligator clips, and Invisible Fence wire (It's the perfect size for the AT ports:)), and soon I was playing around in DOS.

I'm tempted to try to install Linux on it since right now it's collecting dust...

As for DOS in a 64-bit CPU, my laptop with an i3 boots DOS 5.0 just fine. Doesn't recognize the C: drive, though...

Ok, I'll bite... How can a system requiring C: (and that, as the first, and active partition, on the first drive) not recognize C: and still boot?

Hi there,

that's about what I'd expect - though I'd wish you were more precise: Is it actually the HDD itself that DOS doesn't recognize, or just the partition (the file system)? Fact is that DOS 5 won't recognize any file system other than FAT12 or FAT16, which you're not likely to have on your today's laptop. It should, however, be able to detect the drive as such, even though there's an issue with drives larger than 128GB - DOS will only "see" the actual size modulo 128GB - check that with fdisk if you like.
The drive being a SATA one rather than IDE shouldn't matter, as DOS uses BIOS calls to access the drives.

Why do you think DOS 5 would require the C: drive to work? It could also boot from a floppy disk or from a USB drive in legacy mode, emulating an FDD or HDD.

[X] Doc CPU

Floppy disk I imagine

You're probably correct that it just fails to recognize the partition...

As for booting without a C: drive, AFAIK DOS floppies only use the A: drive. Probably why when it booted I was greeted with "A:>"

Yeah, sorry. I guess I haven't considered a 1.44MB Floppy anything more than a skeleton repair disk since Vic20 days. Even though I ran a Freesco router several years ago that would run pretty well from floppy, I put it on an old 60MB hdd I had gathering dust. IIRC, DOS 6 all compressed down for the install diskettes took 3. Now I'm finding my memory taxed as to whether any of the 64bit systems that would "error out" on working hdd DOS systems would boot a DOS floppy, and in either case, why. Project! :)

I'm now regretting letting my other half dispose of my 386 and 486 hardware collection! Maybe this week I'll stop procrastinating and do an inventory of what's still floating around.

Well it depends. Being clever, one floppy can make a usable system. With multiple you can do quite a bit without a hard drive

Definitely not a good choice. 486 class machines are selling for up to $100 US now

Yes, but why would one? A Master Plumber once quipped an altered cliche I like very much. He said


and Yes, I have on occasion employed the handle of a screwdriver to pound something, but only when I didn't actually have a hammer. Hmmmm... That reminds me, in light of your last sentence, I think I should put my 10,000 year old hammer up on eBay.... bids start at only one dollar per year ;)

I cannot understand this sentence