Comment by haZard_OS

8 years ago

Packard Bell 486 was my first desktop. I remember working on a green screen at school and discovering the CLI. I probably crashed half of the school's computers just playing around.

6 comments

haZard_OS

tetraca 8 years ago

I had one at home, tinkering around and learning to program in QBASIC on it. I wish I still had it just to experience the certain charm of doing things the way you used to do them, but it sadly stopped consistently booting over a decade ago.

ashark 8 years ago
I'd pay $300 (maybe more) right now for a tiny, durably-housed (I'd be letting my kids use it) 486-alike machine with a smallish integrated-into-housing LCD and keyboard, and maaaaybe a mouse and an old-school joystick/pad or two, but their absence is in no way a deal-breaker, running legit MS-DOS 6.x or something 100% compatible (not sure how FreeDOS is on the compatibility front) with some reasonable solution for getting software onto it over USB or SDCard or something. And a foolproof factory-reset hardware switch. No moving parts a must.
- ghaff 8 years ago
  
  I know this may not qualify as "durably housed" but maybe get your hands on an old Netbook or similar laptop? I'd probably give FreeDOS a try for the OS. It's still supported to some degree and is probably better than getting your hands on an old MS-DOS or DR-DOS that hasn't been touched in years. It was good enough for a couple of the major PC makers to ship it on a few models in later years.
  You could build something for kicks but a laptop would be a lot easier and probably cheaper.
  [ADDED: I have an old laptop I don't use for anything any more. I may give this a try myself.]
  
  1 reply →
- michrassena 8 years ago
  
  A Raspberry pi will do all of that. Emulating a 486 is no big deal these days. Otherwise, early Pentium laptops aren't hard to come by.

deadmetheny 8 years ago

The 486 was a fun box, for sure. One of these days I wanna retrofit an old case for modern system use, complete with a cheeky "turbo" button.