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A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

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Re: A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

#92
post #9

No turbo button?

It's an 8088, not a 80286! This one isn't even 16 bit.

There were 8088 variants rated for 8+ MHz, motherboards supporting them had independent oscillators for the CPU and the ISA bus and you could switch speeds with software or a keyboard shortcut. Maybe also a button?

Re: A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

#93

A "real hardware" approach to retrocomputing like displayed here appeals to me because it much better captures parts of the experience lost to emulation. Things like insanely low latency thanks to there not being a fractal spiral of hardware and software abstractions sitting between everything. It's much more simple, and you can feel that. That said I'd also like to see some modern advancements brought in… for exampl…

One thing I'd love to see is a Pentium III class machine with a lot of cache and ram with a pcie SSD in pocket size. I feel like those machines were held back by hard drives of their day.

Look into things using the Vortex86DX3.

Re: A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nearly all of the old stuff just sucked. there's a reason we threw it all away (for the most part) and have turned to emulation. the new low power SoC systems with actual connectivity are much more interesting... probably why they can barely keep the stuff in stock. as a bonus, they can run emulation just fine. old, and new, in one package.

I feel the same way about computers of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. I owned several of them, used them a lot (mostly programming for fun), and much of the experience just sucked. I do not understand the appeal of retrocomputing. But I'm happy that there are a lot of options for people who like that sort of thing.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug

Re: A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

#95

A "real hardware" approach to retrocomputing like displayed here appeals to me because it much better captures parts of the experience lost to emulation. Things like insanely low latency thanks to there not being a fractal spiral of hardware and software abstractions sitting between everything. It's much more simple, and you can feel that. That said I'd also like to see some modern advancements brought in… for exampl…

That said, the 8088 wasn't 3nm, it was 3µm.

Re: A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

#96
post #35

Seems like a great distraction-free writing machine.

Likely doesn’t support anything except 8-bit encodings, so only suitable if you’re writing in English without fancy punctuation like em-dashes

You should be able to switch encodings/codepages in DOS; 8-bit encodings cover many languages, and includes "fancy punctuation". Even the default cp437 covers quite a few of the languages in Latin script.

Re: A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

#97

A "real hardware" approach to retrocomputing like displayed here appeals to me because it much better captures parts of the experience lost to emulation. Things like insanely low latency thanks to there not being a fractal spiral of hardware and software abstractions sitting between everything. It's much more simple, and you can feel that. That said I'd also like to see some modern advancements brought in… for exampl…

> fractal spiral of hardware and software abstractions

I've often used "onion", but this is much more accurate :)

Re: A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any modern Intel laptop should be able to run the same software, without emulation. Unfortunately not, UEFI-only BIOSes and locked-down bootloaders are a thing today.

Is there something wrong with using a VM?

Yes. The emulation is not even 80 % acurrate. Especially keyboard interraction is problematic. Then the VM seems to stutter.

Re: A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

#100
post #35

Seems like a great distraction-free writing machine.

Likely doesn’t support anything except 8-bit encodings, so only suitable if you’re writing in English without fancy punctuation like em-dashes

This editor [1][2] supports Unicode.

[1] http://www.texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Blochek

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20221113215247/http://laaca.sweb....

EDIT: VGA only, though :-(

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