22 Nov
2007
22 Nov
'07
12:34 p.m.
Not enough ram, at 8mb it become moderately useful. I
used to make
headless print network servers that way. Install 95B, strip out OE/IE
and cruft install laser printer driver put on net. It usually fits
well in 100MB. Prefered CPU for that was any of the miniboard 386 or
486s but one time I had a 386sx/16 brick and used it with good results
(it was a slow printer to start with). The boards with 86sx were best
cooling was never an issue so the fans could fail and CPU coolers
were not needed.
Right, with 8mb or more RAM, win95 was a pretty decent experience most
of the time. But my 20Mhz, 4mb, EGA machine was an experiment just to
see what was the lowest spec hardware I could get 95 to run on. The
lack of RAM was one thing, but the Miniscribe MFM drive and controller
was what really made the experience :). No native 32-bit drivers for
the controller, and a seek time of somewhere around 3 seconds (ok, I
exaggerate) meant that the machine was waiting for the disk most of the
time, and since it was swapping constantly... well, I booted it once
just to say I'd done it and left it at that :).
Josh