> Technically, the Am386 could run Windows 95, but it wasn’t a great experience.
Technically not. It can run it. Was slow? Yes, but my Am386DX40 keep working fine from 1991 to 1996. Running DR-DOS 6, MS-DOS 6.11, Windows 3.1 and finally Windows 95. And, of course, I could play DooM 2 on it. At some point, I got a math copro.
Finally, my father upgraded the machine with an AMD 486DX5 133MHz.
My father got me a second-hand computer with Am386DX-40 somewhere around 1997, IIRC. An upgrade to older 286.
It was two generations old at that time but still a lot of fun: it could run a lot of games (incl. DOOM, of course), programming (largely Turbo Pascal 7), and some word processing under Windows 3.11.
I didn't bother with Win95, though.
I've been using it up until 1999, when I finally got a then-modern computer with Windows 98. But in some ways MS-DOS felt more capable - I really knew what each file is for, what computer is doing, etc. I.e. the entire machine is fully comprehensible. You really don't get it with Windows unless you're Russinovich or something.
Modern Linux can't even scratch a 486 and some Motorola platforms. Or VAX. Heck, I run NetBSD 10.1 vanilla under simh 3.8 for 9front emulated on an amd64 laptop (old Celeron, 2GB). Slow, but enough to play Slashem.
On portability on compilers, plan9/9front it's unbeatable. Do you now Go compiling from any OS to any arch? The same here, but just for an OS obviously. Albeit I can still run Golang under i386, and tools like Rclone under 9front i386.
That's really cool.
That's a very limited view of what portability means.
Driver support for a niche SoC? Good luck getting NetBSD on before Linux. The sheer amount of SoCs supported by the Linux kernel dwarfs anything NetBSD has to offer.
Yeah, NetBSD's support for modern hardware isn't amazing compared to Linux. I love it (and run my personal web server on it!), but the portability thing feels like a meme from the 4.4BSD days, where it ran on basically every workstation platform.
Like sure, it runs on my VAX, my Sun4/75, and my Alpha box, but it doesn't run on my POWER9 workstation nor does it run my Amlogic A311D ARM device (at least in a usable capacity), and I couldn't even get i.MX 8M running. I didn't try super hard, to be fair, but why would I burn cycles getting an OS with less peripheral support running when Linux "just works"?
I doubt NetBSD "just works" fully on those systems either. I see a lot of rose tinted glasses when NetBSD portability comes up. Those older systems barely get stress tested, as the system has become too large to be self-hosted on them anymore and has to resort to using cross compilation to build a working base.
At least OpenBSD, when it says it supports a platform, _actually supports that platform_, and the system is stable enough that it can build itself.
And NetBSD is missing support for an order of magnitude more SoCs. I like NetBSD. I've run it on several systems in the past, and not just as a toy. I like the whole BSD family, and even deploy FreeBSD in production at work, and use OpenBSD on my home router. But NetBSD's claim as the most portable OS doesn't hold up these days.
> Technically, the Am386 could run Windows 95, but it wasn’t a great experience.
Technically not. It can run it. Was slow? Yes, but my Am386DX40 keep working fine from 1991 to 1996. Running DR-DOS 6, MS-DOS 6.11, Windows 3.1 and finally Windows 95. And, of course, I could play DooM 2 on it. At some point, I got a math copro. Finally, my father upgraded the machine with an AMD 486DX5 133MHz.
Which math copro? If you had a 386DX then I believe you had the math copro? The 386SX did not have an FPU and needed the additional 387SX.
My father got me a second-hand computer with Am386DX-40 somewhere around 1997, IIRC. An upgrade to older 286.
It was two generations old at that time but still a lot of fun: it could run a lot of games (incl. DOOM, of course), programming (largely Turbo Pascal 7), and some word processing under Windows 3.11.
I didn't bother with Win95, though.
I've been using it up until 1999, when I finally got a then-modern computer with Windows 98. But in some ways MS-DOS felt more capable - I really knew what each file is for, what computer is doing, etc. I.e. the entire machine is fully comprehensible. You really don't get it with Windows unless you're Russinovich or something.
So in a way 386 was a peak computer for me
NETBSD still can run on it too :) Best and most portable os in the history
> most portable os
Eh... I think the Linux kernel + your choice of libc/userland has it beat these days.
The Linux kernel dropped 386 support fourteen years ago.
https://www.theregister.com/2012/12/12/linux_no_longer_runs_...
Modern Linux can't even scratch a 486 and some Motorola platforms. Or VAX. Heck, I run NetBSD 10.1 vanilla under simh 3.8 for 9front emulated on an amd64 laptop (old Celeron, 2GB). Slow, but enough to play Slashem.
On portability on compilers, plan9/9front it's unbeatable. Do you now Go compiling from any OS to any arch? The same here, but just for an OS obviously. Albeit I can still run Golang under i386, and tools like Rclone under 9front i386. That's really cool.
That's a very limited view of what portability means.
Driver support for a niche SoC? Good luck getting NetBSD on before Linux. The sheer amount of SoCs supported by the Linux kernel dwarfs anything NetBSD has to offer.
Yeah, NetBSD's support for modern hardware isn't amazing compared to Linux. I love it (and run my personal web server on it!), but the portability thing feels like a meme from the 4.4BSD days, where it ran on basically every workstation platform.
Like sure, it runs on my VAX, my Sun4/75, and my Alpha box, but it doesn't run on my POWER9 workstation nor does it run my Amlogic A311D ARM device (at least in a usable capacity), and I couldn't even get i.MX 8M running. I didn't try super hard, to be fair, but why would I burn cycles getting an OS with less peripheral support running when Linux "just works"?
I don't think Linux "just works" on VAX, Sun4/75, or Alpha.
My experience with Linux on a Sun Sparcstation 20 circa 2000 was that it was slow as hell compared to Net or OpenBSD.
I doubt NetBSD "just works" fully on those systems either. I see a lot of rose tinted glasses when NetBSD portability comes up. Those older systems barely get stress tested, as the system has become too large to be self-hosted on them anymore and has to resort to using cross compilation to build a working base.
At least OpenBSD, when it says it supports a platform, _actually supports that platform_, and the system is stable enough that it can build itself.
Modern Linux dropped support for a lot of old and niche CPUs.
And NetBSD is missing support for an order of magnitude more SoCs. I like NetBSD. I've run it on several systems in the past, and not just as a toy. I like the whole BSD family, and even deploy FreeBSD in production at work, and use OpenBSD on my home router. But NetBSD's claim as the most portable OS doesn't hold up these days.