I recently acquired an old Packard Bell machine with 8 MB of RAM and an Intel 486SX. I need to put an OS on that hardware. I know that FreeDOS might run on this system, but naturally, I am not nearly as familiar with the C-prompt as with bash.
So, I'm wondering if there are any Unix-like operatin...
8MB of RAM is just too little for anything modern at all :-( My first thought was to offer QNX for x86 but I'm not even sure it will run: qnx.com/download/feature.html?programid=14859
"I need to put an OS on that hardware." For any particular reason? With such limited hardware you'll probably want to select a distribution that is tailored to the application you have in mind. Which is.... ?
have you considered checking if it can take more memory? 8 MB may be 8x 1MB simms, but its plausible that 2MB or 4MB simms may be accepted. 8x 4MB would be 32 MB total giving you more options while remaining authentically vintage.
My first workplace machine was a monochrome hercules monitor in 1999. Later I wrote a cgi in C, generating images from a mysql database, and it convinced my boss to buy a color monitor for me. :-)
Do you really need to use such an old PC? Contrary to what one might think, it is not environmentally-friendly or cost-effective. Any software would run faster in Qemu on a Rapsberry Pi. Such old PC use a lot of power even when idle; assuming 60W (not sure about that figure, but I think it's an underestimation unless it's a laptop) and electricity prices in my country, running it for a year non-stop costs 91€, which would more than pay for the Raspberry Pi.
"I need to put an OS on that hardware." - surely the software you want to run on this hardware determines which OS you install. If you want to run Windows 2, then there's no point trying to install Linux.
Even if you were able to upgrade RAM and shoehorn a *nix OS onto that, you would have a difficult to impossible time running any actual software. What are your objectives to using this computer? Depending on the specific hardware this might be a good PC for "retro" DOS games (early to mid-90s). If so FreeDOS would be your best bet. Otherwise you're pretty much limited to Windows 3.1 (which is only going to run "retro" Win16 apps) or with some more RAM maybe Windows 95, which will be pretty painfully slow and compatible programs limited.
@J... My home PC was colored. But in office scenarios, colored screens were not considered an absolute must have at the time. Also the country was not a well developed one, it was not yet a decade after communism collapsed in it. And it was my first job, beside my studies, obviously it was not the case as I could whine too much for a better machine.
@J... I was essentially a student co-worker at a garage company, in a trial period, employed for a super-low salary, worked on a garbage machine built together from spare store parts. And there was no unused color monitor in the store, so I got an (already at the time) ancient one. The monitor and the hercules video card came from different parts of the store. :-) I had luck, X11 worked with it well. :-) And it was grayscale, so there were no palette problems like with the 256-color vgas.
I recall a distro called "Damn small Unix" or something like that. It had a footprint of a few megabytes.
re monochrome in 1999: Yes, monochrome screens (amber or paper white) had higher definition than color and were used in special applications like medical imaging and desktop publishing. But I do recall it was mid 90's that decent color screens became affordable in the USA. True monochrome screens (continuous phosphor coating, no dots) were very high quality and cheaper.
I think the machine could work as a slow, but usable X terminal to current computer. If you are very hardcore, you might try even a termux + android combo to your phone :-)
@J... I was using monochrome monitors up until the mid to late 90s, I preferred high-quality text (yay! hercules) to low-resolution colour - in fact, I loathed low-res graphics. I ran X occasionally when I needed it, but didn't run it all the time until after I got a Matrox G400, I just used VTs and GNU screen, and was happy enough with lynx as my browser. Fortunately, graphics quality has been decent enough for decades, so I use X on everything except headless servers. Even now, I mostly use X to get lots of terminal windows/tabs on my monitor.
IMO your best bet would be to use an ancient distro (definitely pre-2000, maybe pre-1998, or even earlier) on your ancient hardware. Don't expect X to run well, or at all. BTW, 8MB was twice as much as I had on my AMD 386-DX40 back in '91, when compiling the kernel was a "leave it to finish overnight while I sleep" kind of job. I had a bunch of old terminals (scavenged, with permission, when a local university was chucking them out) connected to that machine, along with an annex terminal server, and a trailblazer modem for uucp mail & news.
@cas The 90s was a warp tunnel. Mid and late were very different. Mid 90s monochrome would not surprise me. By 1999, though, they were nowhere - you'd have been among a very rare few that were still holding onto them. The last of the classic monochromes were the Apple 20" and those were 1989. That's two or three computers before 1999.
@J... matrox g400 didn't come out until 1998. I was using my hercules card until i got one of those. Back when I was using MS-DOS in the 80s, I had an EGA card for a while but got myself a Herc to replace it. In fact, a preference for text over crappy graphics was part of the reason I switched from my brief dabble with OS/2 to Linux (also, Taylor uucp was much better than PDUUCP on OS/2). Like I said, I didn't care about graphics back then. I did (and still do) care about text quality. Hercules had decent text, and any colour card I could afford didn't, not until the late 90s.
Discussion on question by Slancaster:…
Discussion on question by Slancaster:…