1y ago

$200-ish laptop with a 386 and 8MB of RAM is a modern take on Windows 3.1 era

arstechnica.com

$200-ish laptop with a 386 and 8MB of RAM is a modern take on the Windows 3.1 era

Pocket 386 supports external accessories and will just barely run Windows 95.

Technology @lemmy.world

salarua @sopuli.xyz

1y ago

$200-ish laptop with a 386 and 8MB of RAM is a modern take on the Windows 3.1 era

arstechnica.com /gadgets/2024/06/the-ultimate-windows-3-1-laptop-sellers-behind-book-8088-are-back-with-pocket-386/

34 comments

This is cool but not for $200. That's way overpriced for something this underpowered.
- Right? Surely you could translate it to run on a $1 esp32?
  
  This is actual hardware. Yes simple arm cores can pretty faithfully emulate much of this. But that's emulation. These are bespoke devices, built from actual old chips. Offering a level of comparability and predictability emulation can't always achieve. It isn't for everyone.
  Adrian Black ended up with a non functioning unit sent to him by a viewer that bought one. The seller rather than pay for postage for the broken one to be sent back to China just told them to keep it and sent them a replacement instead. Adrian ends up troubleshooting and fixing it but you can get a pretty good look at everything going on inside and some of the old chips involved.
- Companies are actually willing to pay a lot of money for legacy hardware.
  
  Maybe, but this doesn't seem to be a product made for businesses. It looks like a product designed for hobbyists.
Running anything on a 386 was NOT fun. I don't think I'd pay $200 for the privilege of hating it all over again.
- At the same time, it forced me to learn. Nowadays, every game and app you’d want is a few clicks away, and most likely it’ll just work without having to think about IRQ settings or COM ports or whether there’s enough space on your 50 MB hard disk.
  
  Yeah, but they should have gone with a 486DX, or SX at least. HUGE difference. The 386 was just too damned frustrating, but it was the first work PC I ever laid hands on. For a personal computer, I upgraded from a 286 to a Pentium 200.
The first two ads I see under the article are for hearing aids, which probably describes the target market for this thing.
- WHAT?
  
  Found Stone Cold Steve Austin.
Out of curiosity, what’s the utility in this? Is it meant to be a toy of sorts?
- I've got a 486SX industrial PC that I refurbed. Much fun!
  But you can hardly expand this thing at all. And there's a hella dividing line between a 386 and any given 486. I got mine loaded with 128MB, USB floppy emulator (a MUST have) and an SSD (through adapters). You just can't do that with this animal, can't even add a math coprocessor.
  I'd give $20 to have one to play with, that's it.
- Nostalgia
- Possibly for government use? I know of a few systems running on the oldest software possible.
  
  Industrial applications might be a thing!
- Probably jumping on the popularity of retro gaming
  
  Which is about to get a whole lot harder with sony/nintendo shutting down rom sites and abandonware sites. It means you'll need to have the original media the games came on.
  And hopefully you can find that copy of Warcraft 2, Tides of Darkness on a cd thats not TOO scratched up.
  "This way! No THAT WAY!!!"
- King's Quest V
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
"all the frustrations of youth" for only $200!
- This laptop is going to emulate the experience of watching my parents fight, throw my 14 year old sister out of the house, and eventually seperate, all while having no friends, and being an athiest attending a catholic school???
  ...........nah, I'm good.
  
  "The Aristocrats!"
I feel like I should be hacking a Gibson from grand central station with this.
Couldn't this be done with an FPGA?
- Yeah. There's the ao486 core available on MiSTer.
  There's also the PCem (as well as forks 86Box and PCBox) software emulators which are excellent ways of emulating old PCs.
  But emulation (regardless of whether hardware or software) is not the same experience as real hardware, especially when it comes to PCs. There is the tinkering with hardware, the process of building the PC, the satisfying click of the power button and turbo button, using floppy disks, trying to get it online, etc.
- Probably. Even including the RAM on chip and the rest of the mainboard, too. Take a modern flash chip, and you can emulate a vintage sized HDD with it.
What is their intended market? I see no real use for such a box. Heck, even Linux will probably come to a crawl on that box. And you can probably build something ARM based for the same price with eight gigabytes of RAM and running circles around the 386.
- Retrocomputing hobbyists and collectors.

34 comments