Can You Install Linux On a 1993 PC? (yeokhengmeng.com) 253
Slashdot reader yeokm1 writes: The oldest x86 CPU that the Lnux kernel supports today is theoretically the 486. However is this theory actually true in practice? I decided to put this theory to the test in my project.
His site describes installing Gentoo Linux on an "ancient" IBM PS/1 Consultant 2133 19C (released in 1993), with 64MB SIMM-72 RAM. (Though to speed things up, he compiled that minimal version of Gentoo on a modern Thinkpad T430 released in 2012.) "Due to the age of the PC, the BIOS only supports booting from the floppy drive or internal HDD," so there was also some disk partitioning and kernel configuration. ("Must disable 64-bit kernel for obvious reasons!") A half-hour video shows that it takes almost 11 minutes just to boot up -- and five and a half minutes to shut down. "Despite the many roadblocks I faced, I was impressed by the level of support Linux has for ancient hardware like this."
And there's one more added bonus. "Given the age of the 486 (1989 technology), it does not support branch prediction... Ironically this makes it safe from the Meltdown and Spectre attacks."
His site describes installing Gentoo Linux on an "ancient" IBM PS/1 Consultant 2133 19C (released in 1993), with 64MB SIMM-72 RAM. (Though to speed things up, he compiled that minimal version of Gentoo on a modern Thinkpad T430 released in 2012.) "Due to the age of the PC, the BIOS only supports booting from the floppy drive or internal HDD," so there was also some disk partitioning and kernel configuration. ("Must disable 64-bit kernel for obvious reasons!") A half-hour video shows that it takes almost 11 minutes just to boot up -- and five and a half minutes to shut down. "Despite the many roadblocks I faced, I was impressed by the level of support Linux has for ancient hardware like this."
And there's one more added bonus. "Given the age of the 486 (1989 technology), it does not support branch prediction... Ironically this makes it safe from the Meltdown and Spectre attacks."
Interesting project (Score:5, Insightful)
"Ironically this makes it safe from the Meltdown and Spectre attacks."
No, there's no irony there at all - not even in the manner "irony" gets misused sometimes.
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No, there's no irony there at all - not even in the manner "irony" gets misused sometimes.
Of course there is - in that aspect the 486 is more secure than the new chips that are billed as having all sorts of security-promoting features.
There's no NX bit on the 486, though, so overall it's not more secure, even with the recent vulnerabilities.
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There's no NX bit on the 486, though, so overall it's not more secure
Why is that? Side channels like those you can't fix easily, but NX is avoided by simply fixing your runtime bugs, or by using safe languages. What is so magical about NX that makes any system without it automatically insecure?
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Like rain on your wedding day?
Watercooling (Score:2)
Just need to get refrigerated mineral oil running over that and clock it up to a GHz or two to get it going. Very impressive overall.
If only more old hardware was supported. (Score:2, Interesting)
The big loss is that Firefox and Chromium no longer work on pre SSE2 processors so you can't surf the modern web on old computers anymore.
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Windows 8 and later require SSE2 too
https://support.microsoft.com/... [microsoft.com]
Windows XP and 7 don't.
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It's actually worse than that, since Windows 8 and later require the NX bit, which came out around the same time as 64-bit, so you can't install Windows 8/10 on anything older than about 2005 or so. I don't think there are any chips that have the NX bit but lack SSE2, but plenty the other way around, like any Socket 478 P4.
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It needs cmpxchg16b in 64 bit mode too
https://answers.microsoft.com/... [microsoft.com]
Which means it doesn't have a 8TB address space limit. On the other hand it also means it won't run on the original AMD Opterons
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c... [microsoft.com]
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c... [microsoft.com]
Re: If only more old hardware was supported. (Score:2)
Lynx? No?
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The big loss is that Firefox and Chromium no longer work on pre SSE2
Firefox works on ARM which has no SSE2.
Is this about the precompiled binaries?
When JS JIT emits SSE2 instructions (Score:2)
Firefox works on ARM which has no SSE2.
Is this about the precompiled binaries?
It's also about the JavaScript JIT code generator. If the x86 and x86-64 versions of Firefox are hardcoded to emit SSE2 instructions, the browser can't be so easily recompiled not to require SSE2.
Re:If only more old hardware was supported. (Score:5, Informative)
The big loss is that Firefox and Chromium no longer work on pre SSE2 processors so you can't surf the modern web on old computers anymore.
This is simply not true. Firefox builds just fine on a PIII here, using gentoo. You just need an ffmpeg that's built without SSE2.
Chromium won't build on a PIII, but that's not because of SSE2, but because you need at least 2 GB RAM to link it.
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Can you not compile them to run on a non SSE2 system?
I've used firefox successfully on non x86 processors which clearly don't have SSE2 support.
Re: If only more old hardware was supported. (Score:4, Interesting)
Before anyone gets *too* nostalgic for old games, remember that in the *really* old days (early 80s), game development went something like this:
1. Discover some cool graphics hack that let you do something novel... reuse sprites, change graphics modes mid-screen, animate by changing the color palette, etc.
2. Come up with some excuse to turn it into a game.
3. Create awful, shitty, pointless, and un-fun ports to every other popular system, regardless of viability.
3a. Don't forget CGA, EGA, and Hercules versions, plus Atari ST. And Apple II (non-GS).
Had it not been for Atari's early-80s implosion, we probably would have seen abominations like "Yars Revenge for CGA" (shudder), ignoring the fact that the game's entire reason for EXISTENCE was the "color static" effect.
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we probably would have seen abominations like "Yars Revenge for CGA" (shudder), ignoring the fact that the game's entire reason for EXISTENCE was the "color static" effect.
You mean that trench just to the left of the screen's halfway mark? There are plenty of other ways to draw a trench that the player can duck into, other than just filling a background stripe with game code.
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3a. Don't forget CGA, EGA, and Hercules versions,
You forgot Tandy graphics. ;-)
Re: If only more old hardware was supported. (Score:2)
Don't know about Firefox, but there are significant differences if you use the x87 unit or the sse one to do floating-point computation (especially on single-precision).
It's quite possible that some applications cannot deal with the x87 extra accuracy.
Re (Score:2)
64MB RAM? Eh??? Back then 64MB of RAM cost £60k. And I don't think PCs supported more than 8 or 16MB. I had 4x1MB 30pin and had 2 72pin slots free. Later added 2x2MB in 95 or thereabouts. X would fly with 8 megs. Anyway I forgot more about Linux then I know right now but I think it did run on DX (i.e. 32-bit) machines only, SX was 16-bit, right?
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My 486 motherboard supported up to 32megs. But 16 meg system were for high end use. Pc came with 4 megs which was considered good. Then I spent $650 for 16 more megs to get X11 to run smoothly that gave me a total of 20 megs with my gigabyte hard drive I was really rocking.
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Actually, in the early '90s, the price of RAM was ~$40/ MB ($33/MB according to this list [coursehero.com], so 64MB would cost you around $2500.
Finding a board with 64MB could be tricky, but I seem to remember at least one that allowed it (it supported SMP (dual) processors and was supremely expensive).
Both the 486DX and 486SX were 32-bit processors; the 486SX lacked a float-point processor (you may be thinking of the 386SX, which - although it was a 32-bit processor - only had a 16-bit bus).
Re: Re (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry to burst your bubble my fried but that list is wrong.
What the author fails to mention is that 4 sims of 1mb each would cost £240 yet a single 4mb simm was priced WAY more that those 4 1mb simms. And then a 72-pin simm would again be slightly more expensive than a 30-pin one. To get up to 64MB you would need 4x16MB simms. Probably 72-pin ones as I don't seem to recall anything bigger than 4MB in 30-pin guise. My unix lab (where I'd later come to work at) bought a 64MB simm (or whatever Spar
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Interesting. I wasn't in the market for 16MB memory in 1993; I purchased 1MB modules because just having 4MB was an impressive upgrade. So I have no direct experience with prices for modules of that size. You position makes sense; the larger modules should cost more, as they would have smaller production yields. Still, to achieve the $60,000 price-point the RAM would have to cost $900+ per megabyte. But 16MB modules would be reserved for servers and business applications, and those always are more expens
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1992... Had a 486/33 (no bloody DX or SX). Paid $3200 for 32MB. We were running a departmental server (yeah, wasn't Linux back then... was *gasp* SCO Open Desktop -- before they were evil)
Mac (Score:2)
The Mac Quadra 840av was out in 1993 and supported 128MB of RAM. Heck the old IIci supported that much.
Re: Re i486SX (Score:2)
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I had a DX4 100 with 16MB RAM. Ran BeOS nicely.
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You can use this thing called swap, it will be slow (though perhaps not so slow if using ssd on that 486), but make compilation possible.
I Run Linux On A Commodore 64 (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I Run Linux On A Commodore 64 (Score:4, Interesting)
You joke, but the Contiki [contiki-os.org] operating system, which is now marketed as a modern OS for the Internet of Things, started out as a multitasking, networked operating system for the Commodore 64 and other 6502-based systems. They seem to have scrubbed almost all references to that off their web site, though.
Back in the day (Score:2)
We ran the current versions on our 486, pentium 90s, pentium 200s, pentium 2s and 3s.
For a server type system, they're ok except for power consumption and they can't keep up with gigabit speeds.
For a desktop, internet wasn't something you use extensively. In the pentium 2/3 days AJAX was just starting. Javascript was not used heavily and most people had dialup. Today's internet will be glacially slow if it will even run on older CPUs.
Most of the stuff I do personally and professionally uses web pages wit
Well, this tells me modern software is shit (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Well, this tells me modern software is shit (Score:4, Insightful)
We used to say (back in the 486-era) how software of today is shit and how everything was flying on 286-es in assembler. And 8085s...
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Re:Well, this tells me modern software is shit (Score:4, Insightful)
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...your car would go faster too if you took out all the windows, airbags, seatbelts, the doors and panels, stripped out the seats, air con, reduced fuel tank size to 10% of current capacity, not many people though would say that the car was better and today's cars are shit because of everything they come with.
So the PC equivalent of this? [rcramer.com]
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Your comment reminds me of this classic:
Getting a 5.8s 0-60 time from a 2001 Nissan Sentra:
http://www.rcramer.com/fun/eco... [rcramer.com]
Completely true for the same reasons.
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I think you forgot how slow everything was. I remember kernel builds taking half a day on my 486.
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Amiga's weren't really good for real-time 3D graphics, such as shaded structures etc, due to using planar graphics, as opposed to chunky graphics. However 3D creation software on Amigas was often quite a bit faster than on Mac's with better hardware, or roughly equivalent PC's, due to more responsive UI etc. However, Commodore senior management fucked up a lot, so the Amiga stagnated, and PC just steamrolled ahead.
Memories (Score:4, Interesting)
I switched to Linux in May of 1994. That computer had a 486DX2 66 with a whopping 12 MB of RAM. Slackware was pretty much your only choice, and I installed Slackware 2.0 from 3 1/2 inch floppies.
It took me days and days to get on the Internet with PPP from my dorm room at the university, and from that experience I wrote a mini-HOWTO.
That's where I'd get started if I wanted an authentic 1993 Linux experience. Be prepared for nothing working as you would expect out of the box. Out of necessity I immediately became a Linux developer and author. I even wrote one patch for the kernel and at one time maintained two kernel modules.
Now I pretty much don't do any Linux development except for work, but I've been doing it for 24 years now.
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My introduction to Linux was on an Amiga with a 50mhz 68030 cpu, fpu, and 16mb ram expansion for a total 18mb. It could run an X server quite fine. Later moved over to the PC, but it was only my first steps with the Amiga version that confirmed Linux as the OS choice when I did. I remember the PPP How-To, and really appreciated that one in particular. Thankyou!
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Mine too, but with a 68040... I still have a couple of amigas which can dual boot into linux, and even have a gentoo install running on a 50mhz 68060.
CD-ROM and Plug-and-Play in '93 (Score:2)
I switched to Linux in May of 1994. That computer had a 486DX2 66 with a whopping 12 MB of RAM. Slackware was pretty much your only choice, and I installed Slackware 2.0 from 3 1/2 inch floppies.
On my 486DX2-66 I installed Yggdrasil Plug-and-Play Linux from a cd-rom. Graphics, audio, networking, etc all just worked automatically, it really was plug and play, as easy as a MS Windows install. Only later did I try slackware and learn the more typical cluster-f that was Linux installation, entering various technical parameters for your monitor in order to get graphics to work. To be fair my video was a popular ATI, my audio a popular Soundblaster, my networking a popular ...
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Yggdrasil was the one that came with an instillation video tape that was so dry, it would put one to sleep.
Not that I ever saw. I bought a CD-ROM, that was it. It booted from the CD-ROM, it asked for very basic things like where to install on the hard drive, username, password, that was about it. I guess it would be boring to sit and watch it install but you could mostly walk away and it would install and configure hardware without much if any interaction from the user. It was years ahead of its time with respect to a simple Linux installation. Again, I benefited from popular motherboards and cards so auto detec
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^^^ This.
Yggdrasil worked on all the kit I tried it on. Most other distros failed in some incomprehensible manner.
OTOH the various BSDs all worked just the same way they had on the VAX at work, although I seem to recall OpenBSD needing rather less RAM than the others, but lacking some tool I wanted, so I switched to FreeBSD, and have been using it ev
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I was installing from CD on a 386 w RLL. The CDR was proprietary, and I had a Que book on UNIX to help me... I upgraded from 2M to 5M just to be able to run it... $200+ in RAM right there.
It took a month to get the install working... then everyone told me to spend more money on upgrades...
I wish I had more money as a kid. 12M on a DX2-66 would have been a dream for me. I was on a 12” paperwhite VGA display. And that was 1995...
Get off my lawn (Score:2)
Linux, back in the day, originally ran on 486 processors, and ran well. You could boot the system off 1.44 MB floppy disks and it booted in well under 11 minutes.
Why reinvent the wheel and compile a modern linux when OG distros are still available - like Slack 1.01 from Feb 1995.
Download all 13 floppy disk images (less than 20 MB!) from here: https://mirrors.slackware.com/... [slackware.com].
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Linux originally ran on 386 processors; support for the 386 wasn't withdrawn until Version 3.8 in 2012.
Systemd (Score:2, Insightful)
Systemd is probably the cause of the slow boot time. I'd love to see a light weight modern OS like NetBSD tested. Probably boots 10x faster.
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I have OpenBSD running on a dual ppro 200 mhz with 96 gb ram and a quantum fireball(!) drive. The drive actually impresses me most as it's 20 years old.
The system is running sshd and irssi, and I've even compiled the kernel and some userland updates a few times. There might be some compile errors if you disable things like ACPI, however it is easy to fix with a few variable guards in the kernel.
Not tried X yet though, but I could see if it could drive my pci matrox mga g550 card.
Re:Systemd (Score:4, Informative)
> Systemd...
Gentoo Linux uses OpenRC by default. You have to go out of your way to install systemd.
Check 102 seconds into the video. You can clearly see the string "OpenRC 0.34.11 is starting up Gentoo Linux (i486)"
Prior to that we can see that it takes the kernel nearly 14 seconds to pass control to init.
Actually, watch the video. You get a really good sense of which services take an unreasonable amount of time to start. (Under ordinary circumstances, OpenRC doesn't need to regenerate its service dependence cache, so his next boot will shave a couple of minutes off of the start time we see in this video.)
Out of your way (Score:2)
eselect profile set 7 (or whatever systemd/desktop profile you want)
emerge -avDN @world
systemd-machine-id-setup
Uncomment the systemd line in /etc/default grub and run grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
Reboot - that's about it. It'll usually run the enabled openrc stuff by default. If not just enable it with systemctl.
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Systemd is probably the cause of the slow boot time.
So to be clear, systemd whose single useless feature people advertise as faster boot time is the result of the slow boot time despite the fact that Gentoo doesn't even use systemd?
What next? Systemd kicked your dog and slept with your wife while you were debugging a sysvinit script?
Of course you can. (Score:2)
The more interesting question is can you install a *MODERN* Linux on a 1993 PC?
I was using Linux in '93, so I can state without any doubt that you can *definitely* install it on a system from that period.
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You didn't bother reading the summary before commenting, did you?
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Bringing back fond memories (Score:3)
I well remember testing out operating systems on 486 based hardware. I actually did tests with Windows, with early Linux releases, and with HURD on the same host. HURD was unusable. Linux became a critical part of the environment very quickly, since genuine UNIX systems were much more expensive than our limited development budget could support.
486s were Amazoning (Score:3)
But I got 90% of the performance of a $2000 Pentium for about $300 bucks and most of that was hard drive & ram. I played near arcade perfect ports of X-Men: Children of the Atom & Primal Rage on it not to mention Rise of the Triad and Doom.
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64 MB? (Score:2)
486-dx5@160MHz with 32MB ram (Score:2)
I had a 486 since 1993 that i kept upgrading as much as i could, using other people cheap parts, when everyone started to use pentiums
i finally upgraded to a amd 486-dx5@133MHz, with a vesa local bus card and performed similar to a pentium 75 (except in FPU, where the pentium was more powerfull).
I then manage to grab some 8MB EDO SIMMS and upgraded to 16MB, one year later, to 32MB RAM. The MB only supported max of 16MB of ram and testing i found that with 16MB, the L2 cache helped a little, but with 32MB, i
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forgot to mention... it still boots... but i stop really using in around 2017, when i also got a cheap HP microserver to replace it as a server
My first linux pc (Score:2)
was an AMD 40Mhz 486, i think it maybe already had a 120MB hard drive and 4MB ram, it kicked ass.
i needed to take my zip drive to work to download all the updates, because i couldn't afford internet back then (it was really expensive back in those days).
The '93 ps/1s were easy (Score:2)
The post '92 PS/1s were easy because they behaved like an AT system, but the '92 ones were a bit more difficult. I've done the same thing on a 2133-W13. It was a complicated PS/1 because linux's setup.s couldn't detect the IDE drives. It incorrectly assumed that the FDPT is at 0x41 and 0x46 and the HDD type is at 0x19 in CMOS. While that is true for the AT systems, the PS/1 systems were not AT. IBM released a unixboot.com binary that can solve this for a single boot. With a bit of hexediting to kill the fin
You can make it boot in less than 1 minute (Score:2)
All you need is to compile your own kernel without useless stuff such as ACPI, PCI, USB, SCSI, MD. This is a config that should work like a charm for that system in at most 3 seconds (instead of 14) on a 386sx PS/1 and with a lot less RAM based on 2.4.37.11. You only need SB32, VESA, EL3 (3COM), TTY, ISA, ISAPNP, PARPORT on the hardware side. It also has support for SMBFS. It can further be trimmed without SMBFS and NLS to around 600kb (loading and decompressing are slow on a 386.
https://pastebin.com/Mj0cud [pastebin.com]
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Linux on 1997 pc (Score:2)
KPTI penalty (Meltdown fix) (Score:2)
What kind of question is this? (Score:2)
Can You Install Linux On a 1993 PC
Seriously? Linux used to be run back in the day in 386 computers. I did that on a laptop (not the best experience, except for running a single app, like a database or web server.)
My main mode of running it back in the day was on a 486SX with 2M of RAM (later 4M, what's when shit was flying fast man!)
I ran X, postgress and a web server (to the exclusion of everything else.) Later I turned it into a dev system (gcc/gnat) complete with a whole bunch of other goodies.
Pretty primitive by today's standards,
Re:why does this matter? (Score:4, Interesting)
In 1994 I was using Linux on a 486 DX 50mhz originally with 4 megs of RAM. I had upgrade to 20 megs a few months later, so I could use X efficiently.
What can you do with a 486 Linux system? Probably more then you think. Just not as many things at once. You can run a web server, a database probably not both at the same time. However if you maxed the RAM you could get a lot done on slow CPU. If you checked you fast Computer most of the time your CPU is idle. On a 486 you can do nearly anything you can do on any other 32bit computer.
Re: why does this matter? (Score:2)
I ran a web server with cgi off of postgres95 back then would you believe it. And sendmail.
Re: why does this matter? (Score:3)
I still have fond memories of giving a talk in the 90s in "the $70 web server" to a Linux conf about dumpster diving an old 486 with a minescule amount of ram and repurposing it as a webserver , IRC host and mail server for a bunch of clubs at the uni I was at. (The $75 was for a hard drive and coax network card). I remember being approached by some IBM drones afterwards offering us a license for OS/2 to replace the Linux of the machine. I think my response was something to the effect of "haha.... god no"
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I remember being approached by some IBM drones afterwards offering us a license for OS/2 to replace the Linux of the machine. I think my response was something to the effect of "haha.... god no"
They couldn't even give it away, huh? The only person I knew who was using OS/2 in that era was running a BBS and wanted something more robust than desqview.
LK
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just format floppy disks to weird sizes like 1.722MB so they would fit tomsrtbt that you would never use afterwards. and remember to set up the scsi emulation on your ata CD-Rom drive so you can burn your 650MB CDs at slowest speed possible to ensure they were readable by that discman in your pocket (and remember, only TEAC and Toshiba drives are worth buying).
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So you can decode 1080p H.264 in real-time on a 486? Yeah, didn't think so.
Re: why does this matter? (Score:2)
Actually decoding mpeg layer3 was rather difficult.
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if you want to watch a movie at the time you didn't need nor use a personal computer, you used an appliance that cost 15% of what a computer did.
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I expect that the guy was trying to argue my assertion that “On a 486 you can do nearly anything you can do on any other 32bit computer.”
Except for the fact that I stated “nearly” a 486 can decode h264. It just can’t do it in real time or even close to it.
Yes there are exceptions, and some thing will be slow. But given enough ram and time it can be processed.
I can say the same about the 386 too as it was a 32bit cpu.
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This shows how much Xorg sucks and why the kids today can't see the good on Wayland
All your homework ... (Score:2)
What could you possibly do with this?
Probably all your programming assignments in a Computer Science degree program. :-)
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Most of your programming assignments: yes. All, certainly not! I have coded some assignments that put my i7-6700HQ with 16GB of ram on its knees (salesman problem, perceptron...), running them on a 486 would be madness :( Right now, my current project is a program that could play othello reversi. I am doing it with a neural network without tree search. The trainning of the neural network is done in a similar way of Alphago Zero (self taught with reinforcement learning) and is running since 2 weeks on my GPU
Re: All your homework ... (Score:2)
Presumably you use amd64 not 486, unless your program sucks.
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most things text based?
Re: why does this matter? (Score:2)
On the list of "interesting things to do", getting laid is quite far from the top.
If you're not a horny kid that is.
Re: Pointless support...is pointless. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I hope you never have to retrieve a quarter-megapixel digital photo from your graduation ceremony off an ATA disk. Or an original LaTeX of your final year project, for example. Don't worry soon enough you won't have a cd reader anywhere around you and loads of burned cds...
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Well, I hope you never have to retrieve a quarter-megapixel digital photo from your graduation ceremony off an ATA disk. Or an original LaTeX of your final year project, for example. Don't worry soon enough you won't have a cd reader anywhere around you and loads of burned cds...
My Apple IIc still reads old games on 5.25" floppies just fine, and my USB CD/DVD burner and USB 3.5" disk reader will likely be useful for some time. Rather ironic that I worry the least about my oldest media (vinyl), but it's still archived as well.
CD media suffers from physical decay over time, so archiving into the cloud serves a purpose, unlike installing Linux on 25-year old hardware.
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I spite of user name you are using, you don't seem like much of a geek.
The point is to experiment and learn.
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I spite of user name you are using, you don't seem like much of a geek.
The point is to experiment and learn.
Technical experimentation should have a point and produce value in order to learn from it. This little experiment provides next to nothing, and I guess my time is more valuable to me these days. To each their own I suppose.
Re: Pointless support...is pointless. (Score:2)
Ikr?? What self respecting nerd doesn't futz around with ancient hardware/electronics/tubes/machines/cars to make and see the thing work if not for nostalgia purposes alone?
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