I think you are going to have a rough experience browsing the web in Win95 or Linux with a 486dx4-100 and only 64mb ram

krcroft wrote:

portage (atleast when I quit using gentoo) had become excruciatingly slow, even on modern systems. I'm not sure if they've re-architected it to match the speeds of say 'apt' and 'dpkg', but if not.. it could take a month or more to return results on a 486. I remember portage spinning away for tens of minutes, after which the build would burn through in seconds.

It's not fast by any means, which I suppose is just an inevitable consequence of a giant file-based package database. I do remember sluggish dependency calculations being an issue a few years back, and either they've optimized it somewhat, or computers just got fast enough that it doesn't matter as much anymore. I never looked into what was going on, and didn't go back to see what happened. It was annoying, but never quite as big of a problem for me as how KDE just fell off the to-do list for like two years.

I love Gentoo, and can't imagine using a distribution that isn't some-assembly-required, but they really put the "fun" in dysfunctional.

While I easily use an overclocked Pentium III Tualatin-S as my main system since a year, I don't know how much of usable a 486 system can be nowadays... But here are my two cents. You'll need to squeeze every bit of performance you can out of that computer. So, instead of a 486DX4-100, I'd rather go for a 5x86 system, either AMD or Cyrix (although I'd prefer the former, as I don't know how much you could cope with the weak FPU of the Cyrix 5x86). Also, a PCI 486 motherboard is a must, because you need something that can offload the CPU as much as possible when it comes to the basic I/O operations, and so you'll need a PCI hard drive controller, either SCSI (U320 would be preferrable), SATA (you could use an SSD on your 486!) or ATA133, it would let you use a modern hard drive/SSD and bypass the BIOS limitations, as long as it lets you boot from SCSI.

Second thing, the graphics card. If it's a PCI 486 system, you'll have to find the fastest compatible PCI graphics card you can put in the system. Considering that there's no AGP slot for it (I wish!), you'll have to pick something that could be compatible with the CPU, as I don't know if the latest PCI graphics card support the 486 at all or need Pentium instructions. Maybe a PCI Voodoo 3 could do the job? Either that or just anything high end made for the PCI bus, as long as it's not an S3 Virge or a Trident.

Another thing, the OS. Yeah, you can go with Linux, but if you have enough memory, you could even go with Windows 2000. A Japanese developer, Blackwingcat, made a kernel extension for it that lets you run most of the Windows XP only applications on 2000, and it runs -I tested it on my Tualatin, but it wouldn't run the programs I needed so I reverted to XP- and doesn't consume that much of RAM. If you can, don't forget to tighten the RAM timings as much as you could, to gain a bit of extra speed. Other than that, if I manage to cruise along with a Tualatin-S, a CPU that was faster than the early Pentium IVs, you could maybe achieve a similar result with a way older CPU than mine.

In the end, a little tip about the Pentium II: put it in a BX board (or even better, a Slot 1 VIA Apollo Pro 133A one), put some PC100 CL2 sticks (PC133 in case of the VIA one), run it at CAS2, use a PCI SATA controller with either an SSD or a WD Velociraptor and put the fastest AGP card you can find (being the old 3,3v AGP slot your choices are limited, so I'd pick a Radeon 9800 Pro, just because the nVidia Geforce FX series is terrible, performance wise), install Windows XP, slim it down of all the unnecessary services and crap running in background, install Mozilla Firefox 47 (which runs on a Pentium II!) with the UOC Patch, and you'll enjoy a much faster Pentium II system than you thought it would be.

A 486 as a modern machine... At first I thought everyone is going to be laughing at OP and telling him he's out of his mind, but then I remembered it's VOGONS.

Correct. VOGONS - The asylum the lunatics took over.

dr_st wrote:

A 486 as a modern machine... At first I thought everyone is going to be laughing at OP and telling him he's out of his mind, but then I remembered it's VOGONS.

The fact there are several people encouraging his ridiculous idea says a lot.

BinaryDemon wrote:

I think you are going to have a rough experience browsing the web in Win95 or Linux with a 486dx4-100 and only 64mb ram

Up through 2016 I was able to browse the web (mainly forums) get webmail and do most everything on Windows 98se IE5.5 and an ancient Mozilla web browser all on 64mb and a P133

Webmail Login functionality and a bunch of other things broke hard mid 2016, lost eBay and PayPal around 2013.

Even a newer opera browser couldn’t get into secure logins by 2016.

You could use DOS and the Links browser. It generally works for most things, even logs into the plain HTML version of Gmail. And it’s FAST. Like orders of magnitude faster than Arachne on the same system, and probably twice as fast and stable as using Windows on the same system to browse the web.

I was laughed at in 2003 when I decided to start using my Cyrix 5x86-120 as my main system again. I kept my dual PII-400 on the second channel of the KVM and I really only needed to turn it on once per week at most. A socket 3 in 2003 was doable. Web pages were still slim and many people were still on dialup. I was using NT4.

By 2010, some sites were still supported by IE6, but few would load quick enough. The KVM'ing to the faster machine was constant, to the point that the Cyrix 5x86-120 just sat and served files. Today, the Cyrix sits in the closet without power. It can still load vogons though. A trick I had discovered was that many websites have a mobile version, so if you can trick your 486 into running the mobile version of the site, that will help somewhat. But in 2019, this trick is probably inconsequential.

IE 5 and 6 were both so incredibly painful for web developers that every webmaster on the planet dropped them like a bad habit as soon as the market would allow. (Or more like, as soon as the market would not revolt at being required to upgrade or use something else.) I could not sympathize more. I did a little HTML / CSS coding around that time, and IE 6 was just ... so... dumb.. I would gladly use Opera, Firefox, or Konqueror from that period. But IE? Nuh uh. IE is a lot better these days, but after that experience, I STILL can't stomach using it for anything more than a browser pre-installation environment. It took FAR, FAR too long for MS to get around to releasing IE 7. And that was only marginally better. (But what a relief that margin was.)

gdjacobs wrote:

OpenBSD is developed from NetBSD which had a start contemporary with FreeBSD, right around the time of USL vs UCB being settled. Theo de Raat was one of the founding devs of NetBSD.

386BSD is the ancestor of all three.
386BSD is exactly what the name implies: a port of the BSD code to the 386 architecture.
386BSD was developed at around the same time as linux, but linux ended up becoming the i386 *nix of choice, probably partly because linux was more about practicality, where the 386BSD people were being too perfectionist, and partly because of the lawsuit issues surrounding BSD.
386BSD got forked by the FreeBSD and NetBSD teams early on, and NetBSD was forked to OpenBSD sometime later. Before long, these forks made 386BSD obsolete and the project was abandoned.

Loving the idea. An old machine is perfectly fine if you want to run old software on it but it's already been mentioned here that you'd start to encounter a few issues when you hit the web as it's not the document serving platform that is was designed to be. Having said that, there are versions of Firefox you can get a hold of that run on Windows 9x which would give you a sporting chance. (To be extra sporting, make sure your 486 Machine has plenty of memory, an upgraded IDE controller and more modern hard drive) There are a few web applications such as Hotmail which integrate a modern version of office, be interesting to see if they would work in that setup but I suspect any web app that relies too much on client side processing would struggle.

Matzo wrote:

Loving the idea. An old machine is perfectly fine if you want to run old software on it but it's already been mentioned here that you'd start to encounter a few issues when you hit the web as it's not the document serving platform that is was designed to be. Having said that, there are versions of Firefox you can get a hold of that run on Windows 9x which would give you a sporting chance. (To be extra sporting, make sure your 486 Machine has plenty of memory, an upgraded IDE controller and more modern hard drive) There are a few web applications such as Hotmail which integrate a modern version of office, be interesting to see if they would work in that setup but I suspect any web app that relies too much on client side processing would struggle.

Thank you for all the answers.
Well as obvious the idea would be more a technical experiment to see if and how such old configurations could theorically still be used nowdays if many programmers would come back to extremely optimize low level operating systems / apps just like it was in the past, accepting the limitations of the past.
Obviously I could not go to work with a 486DX computer, but I'd ask myself how much of the modern applications and features were already in the past running on hardware less powerful than modern coffe machines?
People still drive some 60's/70's cars even if they don't have auto-brake sensors, touchscreen controls or whatever things are considered a must nowdays, and I think they are still working quite well.
I know that some things like modern https/html5/javascript web requirements will never work but I would say not cause these old hardware could not technically.

Going back to the config, I have some problems booting netbsd from floppy cause it reboot after the floppy loaded in memory. Maybe while I look for a way to install it or some other unix/linux more modern os, I'll try doing some test with Windows 95/98 even if the first problem will be the usb pci controller drivers and printer drivers.
I have only the DX4-100 as fastest cpu and 64MB of ram, the mobo has PCI slots and looks like a good SIS496 one considering the graphical very nice bios interface with lots of tweaks and options.

386SX wrote:

People still drive some 60's/70's cars even if they don't have auto-brake sensors, touchscreen controls or whatever things are considered a must nowdays, and I think they are still working quite well.

Heh, indeed if there is one hobbyist scene with more lunatics than the retro-computing scene, it is the retro-automotive one.

As a Ghia owner, I fit into both. Ah well, I was doomed anyway.

While I agree with the general optimization standpoint -- as a general rule, I write all of my code using only what is absolutely necessary, and stress way more than I probably should about allocating memory needlessly -- when it comes to HTML, there's not much you can do. CSS was designed for rich text, and got shoe-horned into a GUI design language. It's terrible at this, and the brute force methodology it takes to design even a simple application UI out of a web page is significant.

As an example, I have a 2015 MBP that I use for ... everything. I can run multitrack audio sessions with tons of effects plugins all processing tracks of audio in real time. It's the kind of task that seems like it ought to be more stressful for a computer than it actually is, since a typical track my hover around 25-30% CPU usage. OTOH, in my day job, if I open a browser window and merely navigate to the management UI on a VMware ESX 6.5 box, or a Palo Alto Networks firewall, I can see a noticeable impact on battery life that suggests the CPU is getting hit about as hard as when I'm running 18 tracks of audio in Studio One. It's shocking how inefficient web UIs are.

Oh, I have no doubt that I could use a 2015 PC (and even an earlier one) for everything. But we are talking about a 486 here, come on.

dr_st wrote:

But we are talking about a 486 here, come on.

People have been saying this to me for more than 20 years, but it never phased me.

feipoa wrote:

dr_st wrote:

But we are talking about a 486 here, come on.

People have been saying this to me for more than 20 years, but it never phased me.

Nice contrast with the people who say: "You're never going to need more than an X CPU and, Y HDD and Z memory" 😀

Probably not quite the spirit of what you had in mind since the 486 won't be doing any actual grunt work, but you could always use it to remote-desktop (VNC or other similar program) into a more modern system. Basically, you'd just be using the 486 as a dumb terminal to view and control the newer system.

torindkflt wrote:

Probably not quite the spirit of what you had in mind since the 486 won't be doing any actual grunt work, but you could always use it to remote-desktop (VNC or other similar program) into a more modern system. Basically, you'd just be using the 486 as a dumb terminal to view and control the newer system.

And even that would suck so much you wouldn't believe.