thinking of the "ultimate" retro x86 PCs - what bits to seek/keep ?

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Maciej W. Rozycki once stated:
> On Thu, 2 Jun 2016, Sean Caron wrote:
> 
> > Oh, man, that brings back memories. Trying to bang Linux onto a 386SX-16 with
> > 4 Meg RAM and some puny little hard drive ... My first NAT box! It was pretty
> > excruciating to use, LOL. I bet the throughput could be figured in kpps... ;)
> 
>  I had an experimental early Linux Ethernet bridge installation on a 
> 386SX-16 PC with 2MB of RAM IIRC and 5 NE2000 clones (as many as there 
> were ISA slots left after filling in an HGC adapter for the console and a 
> multi-I/O adapter for the hard disk), driving a network of some 200 PCs.

  I managed to install Linux on a 486 based Laptop with 4M RAM and 120M
harddrive.  It was ... interesting.  Some of my notes at the time:

	http://boston.conman.org/1999/12/13.4
	http://boston.conman.org/1999/12/15.1
	http://boston.conman.org/2000/01/06.2

  I don't recall if I had networking (of any kind) installed or not.  But I
suspect I still have that laptop in storage ...

  -spc