Posted by luke8086 2 days ago
I've been working on a simple OS for tinkering and running bare metal apps on vintage PCs.
Since I couldn't quite decide whether to target pure 16-bit, or slightly more capable 32-bit machines, I ended up with two separate versions:
- GentleOS/32 (https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos32) works on i386+, requires 4MB of RAM and VGA display supporting 640x480x16 mode or any 256-color VESA mode.
- GentleOS/16 (https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos) works on 80186+, requires less than 192KB of RAM and a CGA display supporting 320x200x4 mode.
You can find more details in the repos.
Perfect. Nice to see a platform target stability instead of constantly reinventing itself and its APIs. Definitely want to give it a go!
I had 2 different Librex 386SX laptops, with 4MB of RAM, on long-term loan from work around 1992. One was quite chunky, the 2nd was a slimline thing with an off-centre hinge.
I ran OS/2 2.0 on them both.
So I could run multiple DOS apps, and a WinOS2 VM containing Windows 3.0, meaning I could run Win16 apps as well. And native OS/2 apps, although I didn't have many.
Here's a pic of the original Librex:
https://books.google.im/books?id=tDwEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA27&redir_...
And the 2nd model:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/10gepdd/l...
TL;DR
A 386 with 4MB is small now but at the time this was a fairly serious workstation-level PC. At the time my work desktop was a 386DX but it had only 1MB of RAM.
In its time a 4MB 386 could run any one of multiple multitasking 32-bit protected-mode OSes, including OS/2 2.x, SCO Xenix, Coherent 3 or 4, DR Concurrent DOS/386, and so on.
This was a high-end bit of kit and with one of these OSes, or even with Quarterdeck DESQview, it could multitask half a dozen large and demanding DOS apps, or maybe a couple of the still fairly new Windows apps such as WinWord 1, or Excel 2.
Its wild to me to think of how much old computers could do relative to new. WordPerfect for DOS was always responsive and quick wheb I used it. I've seen ms word cludge up machines that should have plenty of power to run a word processor.
OMG yes please. :-)
Yep, WP for DOS was quick. Rather clunky UI compared to MS Word for DOS, IMHO, but fast. A friend of mine used a simple method to demo its speed: on his cheap monochrome 286 home computer, he loaded the book he was working on -- one big file, a few hundred pages -- and just held down the cursor key to scroll through the whole thing. It kept the entire doc in RAM and the text just blurred as it zoomed through the entire book in under a minute.
Compared then (early 1990s) to Windows where a similar text took tens of minutes, as my faster computer struggled to load in pages of text from disk, render the fonts, etc.
In the late 1980s, Amstrad introduced new CP/M machines, the PCW range:
https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/PCW
They sold for over a decade and shifted about 8 million units. A CP/M computer, in the early Windows era.
Maybe it's time to do that again: a very low-spec machine, but with a crisp e-ink screen and a great premium-grade mechanical keyboard, shipping with a modern FOSS DOS, a compilation of free DOS apps, and some nice friendly graphical launcher. Wrapped up as an easy appliance that doesn't do Internet stuff at all, but makes it trivially easy to save your work on USB media or zap it to modern devices wirelessly.
Form factor of a big late-20th-century laptop, with a massive battery so it can double as a power bank for your phone or something.
You may get some interest from others in the retrocomputing/permacomputing sphere if you implement an Uxn emulator; it is extremely simple and can run on very limited hardware. https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
Vintage hardware would be a great host for Uxn programs, so I suspect this would generate some excitement.
Now I feel like integrating that into various things....
Also, there's an emulator for PS/1 machines at https://www.ibmulator.org/