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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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What to do with old computers 1 Comment More | Login | Reply /

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  • Old Computers (Score:2)

    by ziggy (25) on 2002.11.28 11:29 (#15088) Journal
    The 286 is pretty much a lost cause. It was a great advance when it came out, but that was also before Ronnie Raygun outlawed the Soviet Union. Don't expect much from this machine unless you can use software from that era. (I don't think that even Win3.x will run on it. XENIX would be "fun" if you can find a copy and deal with the pain...) Embedded systems today are using Pentium class processors, so a 286 doesn't even merit the rating of "glorified calculator" anymore. (If it were an Apple ][, a C64 or a Vic20, there might be some nostalgia value in resurrecting it, but 286s are pretty worthless.)

    The 386 and 486 are a little more interesting. The 386 will obviously be more of a challenge, but you should be able to do something useful, like run an small Linux kernel on it. The easiest project I can think of for these machines would be to throw them on a network and make xterms/remote workstations out of them. They're perfectly workable for that use, especially if you've already got a network in place where storage and CPU capacity aren't an issue. If you're lucky, you should be able to get a decent screen resolution and better than 8bit color.

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