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Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
Well yea, but you can get them cheap off ebay, and I admit I don't have the patience to work with crap PC's, I either upgrade them so they work reasonably well or I set them aside.
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I've always enjoyed seeing what I could wring out of limited hardware. My first home computer was an AT&T 3B1, a single user workstation made by Convergent Technologies that ran a port of AT&T System V Release 2. It had a 10mhz Motorola 68010 CPU, and could boot and run Unix in
one megabyte of RAM. Give it more (I had 3.5) and it flew.
My first PC was an old XT clone. That one I did spend money on: it got a replacement motherboard with a 10mhz NEC V20 CPU. The V20 had improved microcode, and could run apps compiled for the 80186. I had a couple, so... It also got an AST 6-Pak card with 1MB of EMS memory, configured as a 512KB EMS RAMdisk, 256KB of cache, and 256KB of EMS for things that could use it. It also had a Hercules mono graphics card and amber monitor, and two Seagate ST-225 20MB hard drives.
One driver was able to reallocate unused video memory to main memory, and the Hercules card let me grab 64KB, so it was a 704KB RAM system. The startup routines copied the command processor and a few other constantly used utilities to the RAMDisk and made it first drive in the PATH, and pointed things that used temp files like PKZip at it as the location. Sped things up nicely.
I ran the MKS Toolkit, a DOS package of all the Unix tools that made sense in a single-user, single tasking environment. The Toolkit included a remarkably complete implementation of the Korn shell, with everything save asynchronous sub-processes. I had aliases that made the DOS PRINT TSR act like the lp spooler. Booted to the Korn shell, you had to dig a bit to tell you
weren't on a real Unix machine.
The big feature was the MKS INIT program. Installed in full Unix compatibility mode, MKS INIT replaced COMMAND.COM as the boot shell. After drivers for mouse, RAMDisk, cache and the like got loaded in CONFIG.SYS, INIT would load and print a Login: message. Supply a userid and optional password, and INIT called LOGIN. Login looked in an /etc/passwd file for a matching ID, changed to whatever was listed as that ID's directory, and ran whatever was specified as the ID's sell. I had an ID that ran the MKS Korn shell, one that ran JP Software's drop-in 4DOS COMMAND.COM replacement, one that ran vanilla COMMAND.COM, and one that ran DesqView.
No need to reboot to switch environments. Exit whatever shell I was using, and control returned to INIT and let me login using a different shell.
When I migrated to Windows for Workgroups 3.11, the structure was still usable. WfWG could run replacements for Program Manager, which were specified in the SYSTEM.INI file. So I had Toolkit IDs that replaced SYSTEM.INI with a version specifying the preferred replacement, then ran Windows. I spent most time in an IBM employee written freeware offering called Workplace Shell for Windows, which emulated as much as possible the Workplace Shell for OS/2. It didn't have Program Manager's 40 program group limit (which bit me hard), had icons on the desktop, and other useful features. When I went to Win95, there was no learning curve for my SO, because the stuff it added were things she'd been using in WPS4Win.
It stayed in place till I went to Win2K. (These days I run Cygwin for a *nix environment under XP.)
(I ran WfWG on an 8MB RAM 16mhz 386 machine. I compared performance with my 3B1, running full multi-user Unix SysV R2 on a 10mhz processor with 3.5MB RAM, and looked in the direction of Redmond, WA and said "What are you
doing?" I still say that a lot...)
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I'd probably run a very stripped-down 98SE (I have an install which is about 80MB, and there are far smaller ones out there!) on that hardware. It'd be plenty fast enough and still do the basics.
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I have Win98SE, and 98Lite, so I could do that, and I've thought about it. But 98SE retained the Win3.X/Win9X "resources" limitation, and there's a fair amount of stuff I consider necessary nowadays I don't believe will run under 98. (I did just find an open source framework that apparently permits some NT specific software to run under 98, but I don't know details on what is supported.)
I also considered installing IBM PC DOS 7 on a 2GB partition, just for giggles. I still have a boatload of DOS software, some of which is still in use in a DOS box on XP.
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Dennis