'90s era PC recommendation.

[Fred Cisin]

On Mon, 7 May 2018, ben via cctalk wrote:
> Unless you have a old copy of DOS, what OS can you get for the OLD MACHINES?

MS-DOS will, of course, work for all.

Xenix 3.0 (1984?) worked with 8088, 512K RAM, 10MB disk.
Microsoft had a license for Unix, since 1978, but NOT for the "Unix" name.
By mid 1980s, Microsoft had the highest volume AT&T Unix license.


Windows 3.00 is the last Windows that will work with an 8088.

Windows 3.10 wants a 286, won't install without A20, with 64K of RAM 
above 1MB (640K, or even 512K in main RAM, and 64K of Extended RAM)
Officially? it needs 2MB, but that is not true.
It would like VGA, but "Hercules" MDA works.
It WILL work with CGA (640x200), using the Win3.0 driver.
It looked at the time that Microsoft porgrammers were using 800x600, 
because that is the only one that really looked "right".

Win95 wants a 386 or above.
(SX was limited to 16MB of RAM, which prob'ly won't work)

Win98 said that it "needs" 486, but 386 works.

Notice that Windoze was in an "I386" directory.

BUT, MICROS~1 often blurred the lines between what was "NEEDED" V what was 
"RECOMMENDED".  Performance issues with Windoze made the "recommendations" 
more important.  And ANY complaints about performance, if answered at all, 
were answered with implications of personal inadequacy, "solution" of 
having you throw hardware at it, and variants of 
"233 MHZ Pentium?? I'm amazed that it would even RUN on that!"
"Deskpro XL?? That's almost 6 months old!  What kind of performance would 
you expect from something that ancient?"

XP calls for a 233MHz with 64MB RAM, 1.5GB disk space, 800x600 display.

Vista calls for 1GHZ, 1GB

Win7 same, but requires internet connection (during installation)


Most will probably run on 386DX, with unacceptable performance.

But, Windoze has raised "unacceptable performance" to a level where even 
we can't tolerate it!
I thought that I could tolerate slow turn-around for batch processing, 
such as "Handbrake", but I eventually broke down and bought performance.

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com