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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

#171

Post by 2b3a51 »

bee_rider wrote: post #50
inconceivable wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fyi these kinds of pen cases have been popular in asia and asian communities worldwide for decades, usually for carrying mechanical pencils and their accessories (extra lead, erasers, protractors, rulers, mini notebooks, sticky pads, whatever) western equivalent would be trapper keepers with their pencil pouches.

You can also probably get little pencil boxes at an art store or some place like that. Would recommend. A little plastic box that prevents me from having to fish around in my backpack possible get poked when I want my pencil is great, and they are pretty cheap.

UK: Try an image search for 'Helix Oxford Maths Set'

Compasses, dividers, protractor, setsquares (that we don't use these days) and a 15cm ruler. Pencils, sharpener, rubber. Usually a stencil for lettering and a leaflet with geometry definitions.

Available from supermarkets, stationers and cash and carrys right now because it is GCSE Maths exam time.

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

#172

Post by hilbert42 »

avidphantasm wrote: post #127
hilbert42 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I do not understand the appeal of retrocomputing." But at least one knew what was going on. If one didn't then one could probe the hardware with a logic analyzer and an oscilloscope. Try that today and see how far you get. Mind you, the 8088 was a dog of a processor, too little too late and far tooooo slow (nobbling the 8086 was a dumb retrograde idea).

Yeah, using an 8088 in this thing seems dumb. My first thought when seeing this was: put a 386 or 486 with VGA in this and I would buy one. This would be instantly useful for retrogaming. 8088 with CGA, not so much (for me at least).

My thoughts exactly, especially the 486. It was a good all-rounder, worked well—thoroughly debuged unlike the Pentium—and fast enough to be useful even today for some work.

Also, I'd heard accounts that some influential third parties (companies developing stuff for the military etc.) were still using it long past its used-by date because it was the last of the 86 line whose internals they could fully understand. IBM was second-sourcing it too.

Incidentally, I wonder where those 8088s come from, same for the 8087. Seems someone still makes them.

__

Edit: Just occurred to me the main/intended use for this computer is as a training aid. The ready access to the chips and that they've sockets for removal would allow access for an ICE (In Circuit Emulator) bond-out chip/board to be inserted. Thus, there's no need for it to run any faster.

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

#173

Post by phone8675309 »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #156
userbinator wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's even a name for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_hard

The difficulty helped hide the fact that you were paying $50 in 1980s money for a game that took approximately an hour to beat. If you could beat it . But I suspect the more common gameplay loop was the one I and my friends encountered: you put the game in, played for 20-35 minutes, got a Game Over. If you were really motivated maybe you tried again and got to Stage 4 instead of Stage 3, but at some point said, screw…

Much of this design also feels like a hangover from the arcade days where you wanted players to die cheap deaths so they plugged more quarters into the machine.

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

#174

Post by kitsunesoba »

2b3a51 wrote: post #170
myth_drannon wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is the same. I'm not talking about slow loading time or changing tabs which I understand. It's the act of clicking on a key.

Emacs? Keyboard lag? Is that with some kind of LSP or other itegration? I find that Emacs keyboard responsiveness on text (on a 17 year old core duo laptop) is indistinguishable from vi or nano.

What they're getting at is that the latency is caused by overhead from the OS and USB, increasing it across the board regardless of editor — each keystroke has more layers to pass through compared to a machine from the 70s, 80s, or 90s, plus USB by the nature of how it works unavoidably adds latency that's variable depending on CPU load, since USB is CPU-dependent. There's also more layers in the display stack, increasing the amount of time it takes for what's actually displayed on screen to match machine state.

A Core 2 Duo era laptop specifically might not suffer as much as its desktop counterpart though, because laptops from that era often used PS/2 for their internal keyboard+trackpad connection and thus don't suffer USB latency increases unless the laptop's motherboard was doing something weird like implementing PS/2 via an onboard adapter attached to the USB bus.

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

#175

Post by ElectricalUnion »

cat_plus_plus wrote: post #166
wang_li wrote: post #7

As a nerd of a certain age I’ve been deeply attracted to retro computing. Even going so far as to place bids on 30 year old Atari STs on eBay since that was a computer I had in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s. But in recent days, through the use of modern emulators I’ve dabbled in these retro systems and I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re just bad. They are fine for the enjoyment of certain games and reliving or just…

Early software was designed to feel as fast as possible, even resorting to hacks like temporarily turning off DRAM refresh to write text on the screen as quickly as possible. Though hardware was very limited, when you pressed a key you generally got a response right away. Fast forward to 2023, and everything runs on top of a non-realtime multitasking OS, causing periodic little glitches as background stuff hogs up re…

> Modern hardware could be of course amazing at being fast, but nobody put in the effort into software designed for that goal.

A lot of effort has being thrown that way, it's just that their definition of "go fast" is "having lots of throughput", not the things you are looking for: goodput, low latency, low jitter.

We got faster mainframes instead of faster minicomputers - computers and network systems that are optimized at doing batch jobs.

We can submit a whole bunch of blocks and the graphics processing unit can display accelerated smooth video for us. Or we can push a whole neural network to a tensor processing unit and have it do inference in very few operations, after the model is loaded. But both of those operations while having smooth output have horrible startup latency.

I think is very naive to call what the devices have today as a "single computer" when in fact, for a long while they're several interconnected computer components joined with lots of buffer.

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

#176

Post by DennisP »

okasaki wrote: post #112
inconceivable wrote: post #32

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.

One thing that didn't suck that we threw away was 4:3 screens though. And chunky plastic builds with easily user-replaceable parts. And nice full 7 row keyboards that felt good to type on. And rounded laptop edges so it doesn't kill your wrists. And ports, lots of ports.

Plenty of mech keyboards feel great to type on.

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

#177

Post by DennisP »

avidphantasm wrote: post #127
hilbert42 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I do not understand the appeal of retrocomputing." But at least one knew what was going on. If one didn't then one could probe the hardware with a logic analyzer and an oscilloscope. Try that today and see how far you get. Mind you, the 8088 was a dog of a processor, too little too late and far tooooo slow (nobbling the 8086 was a dumb retrograde idea).

Yeah, using an 8088 in this thing seems dumb. My first thought when seeing this was: put a 386 or 486 with VGA in this and I would buy one. This would be instantly useful for retrogaming. 8088 with CGA, not so much (for me at least).

Depends what you're looking for. I have fond memories of programming an 8088 in high school with BASICA and Turbo Pascal. I could definitely see getting this to play around with. A 486 could do more but it wouldn't take me back to my roots in quite the same way.

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

#178

Post by Koshkin »

hilbert42 wrote: post #172
avidphantasm wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, using an 8088 in this thing seems dumb. My first thought when seeing this was: put a 386 or 486 with VGA in this and I would buy one. This would be instantly useful for retrogaming. 8088 with CGA, not so much (for me at least).

My thoughts exactly, especially the 486. It was a good all-rounder, worked well—thoroughly debuged unlike the Pentium—and fast enough to be useful even today for some work. Also, I'd heard accounts that some influential third parties (companies developing stuff for the military etc.) were still using it long past its used-by date because it was the last of the 86 line whose internals they could fully understand. IBM…

It's an OKI M80C88A-2, and the genuine Intel 8087.

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

#179

Post by ihateyouall123 »

NovaDudely wrote: post #115
wang_li wrote: post #7

As a nerd of a certain age I’ve been deeply attracted to retro computing. Even going so far as to place bids on 30 year old Atari STs on eBay since that was a computer I had in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s. But in recent days, through the use of modern emulators I’ve dabbled in these retro systems and I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re just bad. They are fine for the enjoyment of certain games and reliving or just…

It always stuck with me when announcing the Virtual Console on Wii U that Satoru Iwata said it perfectly "It can be fun to relive your childhood but just for a little while". It is fun to look back but we tend to forgive a lot of things that kind of sucked. It is like how some people who live through Hurricanes and then a decade later speak about how fun it was coming together even though it was just horrible. Memori…

[dead]

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

#180

Post by Koshkin »

coldtea wrote: post #136
wang_li wrote: post #7

As a nerd of a certain age I’ve been deeply attracted to retro computing. Even going so far as to place bids on 30 year old Atari STs on eBay since that was a computer I had in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s. But in recent days, through the use of modern emulators I’ve dabbled in these retro systems and I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re just bad. They are fine for the enjoyment of certain games and reliving or just…

> No MMU, no FPU, no IP networking. Very limited CPU cycles and memory. Isn't that the whole point?

An FPU is an option though
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