I was just given an old AT&T starstation it is a 386 @ 33Mhz (Enhanced 386 I guess) 4Mb onboard ram & 100Mb hard drive. It has a 3.5", 5.25", 100Mb harddrive so a cd install is out of the question, also I don't believe the BIOS setup is accessible on this box. It is currently running DOS 6.22 & Win 3.11.

My question is what can be done with this dinosaur? NetBSD? I don't expect to have X or any eye candy as Win 3.11 is a bit fuzzy & grainy.

Also the 386 DOESN"T have a coprocesser bummer huh.

Bubba169

could be a good router, if there are slots available. http://linuxrouter.org
P.S. the link seems to be down, probably they are undergoing some upgrade, so check it in a couple of hours or so.

It also make a good learning tool for newbies. Or dornation to a non-profit org., school, community, etc.

I would trash it. The donamtion thing, well I tried to give our local school system some 486, P 60 and P 100's. They really didn't want them. But they took them anyway so we could get the tax right off.

As has already been suggested, you could use it as a router, or as a gateway (never found out what the differences were), a dial-out server, etc. If you're feeling very adventurous, you could even set it up as an answermachine! Just a couple of ideas.

actually, I would say that it could be that both devices could be the same device in most cases, but the gateway I believe has to be the first node that is between your network and the internet, where as a router doesn't really have to be, the gateway will deal with giving the addressing to all of the nodes, and route traffic just like a normal router would, it is just the position that is the difference, although I could be wrong about that, but for a 386, that would be about the only thing I could see it being, unless you want a box that folds really slowly. I guess you could also use it to mess around with stuff you wouldn't even want to touch on your working computer.