An Ancient 386

I bought an old Zenith Data System's brand 386 PC (it's hueg like xbox) at Goodwill for $5.00.  Here are the specs.  It does work, save for the CMOS battery which was dead.

 - Intel 386 CPU (don't know the MHz, probably 25Mhz)
 - 640K RAM (not 1MB, 640K)
 - You should see this big ol' MFM or RLL pre-IDE drive that's in it (some off brand), it's 2 5.25 drive bays tall and heavy, it's a 74MB drive that works perfectly except for one bad sector.
 - 5.25 inch floppy
 - 3.5 inch floppy
 - ISA bus
 - Some weird ISA VGA card
 
I do have this that I can put in it but it isn't in there now.

 - ISA Soundblaster card (would give me an IDE interface and let me install a CD-ROM)
 - 10Mbit ISA network card
 - Logitech 28.8 ISA modem

It belonged to a church.  When I first booted it, I found all sorts of information on some church, including member's addresses and phone numbers.   Always wipe your HDs before you sell them!!! But I reformatted and have MS-DOS 6.22 on there now.

So what should I do with it?

look at pron, DUH

get rid of DOS.  install linux.  use it as a firewall to protect you from teh intarweb.

lmao firewall wut ru stupid

A firewall will take all CPU power

Can i fit linux in 640K?

>>6
no. never. forget it.

You bought this? Ha ha, sucker. Now you're stuck with costs from getting rid of it.

I wouldn't have paid $5 for that honestly, it's a waste of space. Try NetBSD and use it as maybe a firewall, or just a Unix terminal to do shell work on. If GUI is a must, you could try Windows 2. or 3.x, but those may not run in 640K memory.

>>9
Nope. Windows 3.1 requires at least 2 megs of ram, I think 3.0 is pretty much the same. No idea about windows 2.0/386; you could install it, I guess; but there's no software for it, so no real point.

>>1 could hunt down DesqView, though, I guess (no idea about the memory requirements for that, either, though).

>>1
Instructions:

- If it comes with a mechanical keyboard, you've made a great deal. Dispose of CPU and monitor, and get a plug converter to mini-din if necessary to use your new great keyboard. It's 10 to 100 times better than today's multimedia yakshit.

- If it doesn't, you've wasted $5, time and space. Dispose of all.

I ran Win 3.1 on a 1MB RAM machine, but about the only thing it could run was the clock.

>>10 - Don't care about GUI, a commandline is fine too
>>11 - I actually bought an old keyboard at Goodwill for $3 just for this thing.  The 3'5" floppy worked fine and it is in my newly built computer now.  Still too much to pay for a floppy drive though.
>>I don't have 1MB ram on this, it's just 640K

I think the hueg hard drive is cool from an antique-appreciation standpoint.  It's funny how they have 1GB memory cards that are about 1/1,000th the size of this thing.  The defect map sticker is instant nostalgia.

But the coolest thing about this machine, and the reason why I will probably keep it, is that it has a built in DOS DEBUG-like program in ROM.  I can fuck with ASM with no OS at all.

(Furthermore, MSD tells me I only have 8 IRQs, btw)

What I would do if I was you would be take it apart and play with the parts. Seriously when ever I get like dead hard drives I open them up and play with the discs and magnets.

Try compiling a small Linux kernel for it, it just might work :) Otherwise, I heard that Minix works with just 640K of RAM.

>>15
Minix is for hippies

640kB is definitely too little for even a ancient release of Linux or NetBSD. (Free)DOS or Minix (or whatever 80s-era OS you can dig up) are your options.

I've done work on very stripped-down Linux kernels (2.4 sources that fit onto a floppy...uncompressed..) -- the seriously lower limit was 2MB of RAM.

>>17
I was seriously using a 386SX w/ 640kB running Minix-2.0 in 1996 as a long-distance UUCP email and news access.. The things you do when you're stuck out in the country and unemployed, but still have a net.addict to satisfy..