On 16 October 2012 01:56, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
>> >
A Pentium 166 MMX chip, which was a common chip with mobility
>> >features used in some early Pentium-based laptops uses roughly 4.5M
> transistors.
>> Is it supported by current software?
On Tue, 16 Oct 2012, Liam Proven
wrote:
Kind of.
It'd probably run Windows 98(it would definitely run Window
95) OK, but nothing newer from Microsoft as far as I can tell. Memory
limitations within the confines of a P166MMX laptop of the day wouldn't
allow anything newer to run.
Oh, you can.
I not only got NT4 running on my Thinkpad 701C - the famed IBM
"Butterfly" - but even Windows 2000. That's on a 486 with 40MB of RAM.
:?)
Anything that installs from a directory named "I386" oughta work.
I fear that's historical now. IIRC, XP won't run on a 486 and Vista
requires something like a PIII or newer.
Win2K was the last one where "386" *meant* an actual 80386.
I recall a friend of mine experimentally installing I think Win2K on
an early-1990s RIP PC.
RIP PCs were boxes - used in particularly rich design studios and the
like - that sat between a Mac and a high-end printer, capture the
Postscript and then on their own rasterized the very large Postscript
files for printout on poster-sized inkjets or the like, so that you
could continue to use your Mac for other things.
This was a 386 stuffed with boards with RAM on them - something like
256MB or 512MB of RAM. In an ISA-bus 80386. It cost tens of thousands
of pounds when new.
It would actually run Win2K, just /glacially/ slowly.
I always wished that Ryan Rempel, the heroic coder who back-ported
early versions of Mac OS X to pre-OS unsupported Macs, had managed to
get 10.2 or 10.3 running on the PowerPC 604 properly. There was one
Mac clone from Daystar Digital designed specifically for running
complex Photoshop filters on large images. It had 4 PPC604 chips on
it. MacOS 9 ran on one; the others were only supported in certain
specific MP-aware Photoshop filters.
You could just about run OS X 10.2 on a very-well-specced 604; I did
so. But I'd love to have seen an actual SMP-capable OS running on one
of those multiprocessor Mac clones. In theory, it would have performed
really quite well - they were seriously powerful boxes for the mid to
late 1990s.
But there has been some discussion lately about some
software not
supporting any chips that are so old and obsolete that they have
actually made it to market. :-)
Heh!
--
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