Nice Find

From: Hotze <photze_at_batelco.com.bh>
Date: Sun Apr 5 11:00:26 1998

><up comes an Intel flashscreen
>< Inboard 386 PC
>< Vers 1.1 02/17/89
>< Intel Corporation
>
>Same beast I have in my Leading Edge XT.
That would be cool to have.
><Snooper tells me it has 2 ser ports and 2 paral. configured and bench-mar
><20mhz ( don't know how accurate Snoop's bench is but this sure beats an X
>
>It's warped. It's a 386/16 and that's all.
Yeah, but with extra RAM, etc. it could very well benchmark as a higher or
lower MHz, even with today's Winbench's.
>< I was blown away I didn't think an XT much less a PC could be upgraded
><without replacing the MB. And the Hard Card was gravy
>
>That's been going on for a while and there was a AT (286) version as well.
>
>< The possibilities are interesting. I'm wondering if I could beef up the
><Put in an Extended Graphics Adapter (not Array) and hook up my 3270
><type IBM monitor (5272). There's an interesting section in Que's "Upgradi
>
>IF it's ISA-8 you likely can.
>
>< It would be neat if I could run Linux on it.
>< Excuse my blathering but I'm like a kid with an amazing new toy.
>
>No way! All the ram you have is the 1meg on the inboard and I think it
>used the 256k (maximum) on the mother as expanded mem. If yu can find the
>memory card that piggy backs to it you can add either a meg or maybe two
>to it. Nomantter what linux in less than 4meg would be poor and
>completely unrunable in under 2mb.
Linux won't run XF86 even in mono mode with less than 8MB RAM, which makes
zero sense because any PC that shipped with 8MB RAM and a mono card was
either: 1) Something like a NeXT machine 2) A graphics machine, but was
DEFINATELY NOT A GENERAL-USE PC!
    There are several projects going on to have Linux run on 286 and lower
machines, and, of course, lowering RAM consumption. There's an 8MB
distribution that only requires 512K (I believe) RAM, if you give it enough
swap space (in that case, it would be 3.5MB)
>Windows 3.1 does run on it with the 1meg.
It'll run, but in my experience, Windows 3.1 doesn't do to much with it. My
friends 286 (they were still using it last summer when they moved, but it
was retrofit with MY 210MB HDD, and a SVGA monitor and graphics card) You
can't extract files, run most software that was designed for Windows 3.1.
I'd go with 3.0, if I had a choice. If I was you, I would just upgrade to
DOS 5.0 or so. It'll run loads of software, and is more consistent with the
hardware that you have, minus the 386CPU. And, it's smaller, so you could
actually have more software on it. Come to think of it, I believe that
Windows 3.1 is like 25MB, plus the DOS 5.0 that's required to run it, which
fits on 5 720K floppies, I believe.
    Ciao,

Tim D. Hotze
>Allison
>
Received on Sun Apr 05 1998 - 11:00:26 BST