Comment by sockbot
1 day ago
Over Christmas I tried to actually build a usable computer from the 32-bit era. Eventually I discovered that the problem isn't really the power of the computer. Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for 20 years, excepting browser-based software.
The two main problems I ran into were 1) software support at the application layer, and 2) video driver support. There is a herculean effort on the part of package maintainers to build software for distros, and no one has been building 32 bit version of software for years, even if it is possible to build from source. There is only a very limited set of software you can use, even CLI software because so many things are built with 64 bit dependencies. Secondly, old video card drivers are being dropped from the kernel. This means all you have is basic VGA "safe-mode" level support, which isn't even fast enough to play an MPEG2. My final try was to install Debian 5, which was period correct and had support for my hardware, but the live CDs of the the time were not hybrid so the ISO could not boot from USB. I didn't have a burner so I finally gave up.
So I think these types of projects are fun for a proof of concept, but unfortunately are never going to give life to old computers.
> Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for 20 years
It baffles me how usable Office 97 still. I was playing with it recently in a VM to see if it worked as well as I remembered, and it was amazing how packed with features it is considering it's nearing on thirty. There's no accounting for taste but I prefer the old Office UI to the ribbon, there's a boatload of formatting options for Word, there's 3D Word Art that hits me right in the nostalgia, Excel 97 is still very powerful and supports pretty much every feature I use regularly. It's obviously snappy on modern hardware, but I think it was snappy even in 1998.
I'm sure people can enumerate here on the newer features that have come in later editions, and I certainly do not want to diminish your experience if you find all the new stuff useful, but I was just remarkably impressed how much cool stuff was in packed into the software.
I think MS Word was basically feature-complete with v4.0 which ran on a 1MB 68000 Macintosh. Obviously they have added lots of UI and geegaws, but the core word processing functionality hasn't really changed at all.
(edit to say I'm obviously ignoring i8n etc.)
My dad used to run a whole commercial bank on MS Office 4.0 and a 386. (A small one, but still!)
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It's wild to remember that I basically grew up with this type of software. I was there, when the MDI/SDI (Multi-Document Interface / Single-Document Interface) discussion was ongoing, and how much backlash the "Ribbon"-interface received. It also shows that writing documents hasn't really changed in the past 30 years. I wonder if that's a good or bad development.
With memory prices skyrocketing, I wonder if we will see a freeze in computer hardware requirements for software. Maybe it's time to optimize again.
Consumer laptops have been frozen on 8GB of RAM for a while already.
Yeah you can get machines which are higher specced easily enough, but they’re usually at the upper end of the average consumers budget.
Sadly Electron developers will be fired, and C++ and even Rust ones will be highly praised. QT5/6 will be king for tons of desktop software.
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I have MS Office 4.0 installed on my 386DX-40 with 4 MB of RAM and 210 MB HDD, running Windows 3.1, and it is good. Most of the common features are there, it's a perfectly working office setup. The major thing missing is font anti-aliasing. Office 95 and 97 are absolutely awesome.
I do remember running Word on an Am386DX-40 and later an i486DX2-66 and there was an issue that wouldn't be a problem with faster hardware; the widow/orphan control happened live so if you made an edit, then hit print, there was a race condition where you could end up with a duplicated line or missing line across page boundaries. Since later drafts tended to have fewer edits, I once turned in a final draft of a school paper with such an error.
Then again, if you'd also run it at low res on an old CRT it might not or barely benefit from anti-aliasing anyway.
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Totally agree! I‘d pay definitely $300 (lifetime license) for a productivity suite like Windows 95 design and Office 95 with no bloatware and ads. Just pure speed and productivity.
Last true step change in computer performance for general home computing tasks was SSD.
I'd add multicore processors as well, which makes multiprocess computing viable. And as a major improvement, Apple's desktop CPUs which are both fast, energy efficient and cool - my laptop fan never turns on. At one point I was like "do they even work?" so I ran a website that uses CPU and GPU to the max, and... still nothing, stuff went up to 90 degrees but no fan action yet. I installed a fan control app to demonstrate that my system does in fact have fans.
Meanwhile my home PC starts blowing whenever I fire up a video game.
In 20 years? That is nothing.
> I was playing with it recently in a VM
With the small caveat that I only use Word, it runs perfectly in WINE and has done for over a decade. I use it on 64-bit Ubuntu, and it runs very well: it's also possible to install the 3 service releases that MS put out, and the app runs very quickly even on hardware that is 15+ years old.
The service packs are a good idea. They improve stability, and make export to legacy formats work.
WINE works better than a VM: it takes less memory, there's no VM startup/shutdown time, and host integration is better: e.g. host filesystem access and bidirectional cut and paste.
I had trouble getting the Office 97 installer working with Wine. Not claiming it’s impossible but I figured just to play with it I could spin up Qemu.
It's crazy too to realise how much of the multi-application interop vision was realized in Office 97 too. Visual Basic for Applications had rich hooks into all the apps, you could make macros and scripts and embed them into documents, you could embed documents into each other.
It's really astonishing how full-featured it all was, and it was running on those Pentium machines that had a "turbo" button to switch between 33 and 66 MHz and just a few MBs of RAM.
> but I think it was snappy even in 1998.
It definitely was snappy. I used it on school computers that were Pentium (1?) with about as much RAM as my current L2 cache (16MB). Dirty rectangles and win32 primitives. Very responsive. It also came with VB6 where you could write your own interpreted code very easily to do all kinds of stuff.
The curse-ed ribbon was a huge productivity regression. I still use very old versions of Word and Excel (the latter at least until the odd spreadsheet exceeds size limits) because they're simply better than the newer drivel. Efficient UI, proper keyboard shortcuts with unintrusive habbit-reinforcing hints, better performance, not trying to siphon all my files up to their retarded cloud. There is almost nothing I miss in terms of newer features from later versions.
The ribbon thing was a taste of things to come in the degradation of UI standards. Take something that works great and looks ok, replace it with something flashy that gives marketing people something to say. Break the workflow of existing users. Repeat every 10 years.
This! I have the 14-core M4 Macbook Pro with 48GB of RAM, and Word for Mac (Version 16 at this time) runs like absolute molasses on large documents, and pegs a single core between 70 and 90% for most of the time, even when I'm not typing.
I am now starting to wonder how much of it has to do with network access to Sharepoint and telemetry data that most likely didn't exist in the Office 97 dial-up era.
Features-wise - I doubt there is a single feature I use (deliberately) today in Excel or Word that wasn't available in Office 97.
I'd happily suffer Clippy over Co-Pilot.
> I'd happily suffer Clippy
It's an optional install. You can just click Custom, untick "Office Assistant" and other horrid bits of bloat like "Find Fast" and "Word Mail in Outlook" and get rid of that stuff.
My crappy old 2018 Chromebook is still just about usable with 2GB but has gone from a snappy system to a lethargic snail.. and getting slower every update.. Yeah for progress!
Maybe with the price of memory going up, we'll start seeing a more conservative use of resources in consumer software.
A fella can dream, anyways.
eMMC Chromebooks are notorious for storage-related slowdowns. If it's an option, booting a ChromeOS variant or similar distro off a high-speed microSD, over USB, or (least likely with a Chromebook) via PXE might confirm.
“Powerful enough for productivity tasks” is very variable depending on what you need to be productive in. Office sure. 3D modelling? CAD? Video editing? Ehhhhh not so sure.
I hate to tell you this, but people were doing CAD and CNC work on PCs back when a 33MHz 80386 with 8MB of RAM was an expensive computer.
And they did video editing on Amigas with an add-on peripheral called a Video Toaster.
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Except for Internet surfing, a plain Amiga 500 would be good enough for what many folks do at home, between gaming, writing letters, basic accounting and the occasional flyers for party invitations.
Total nostalgia talk. Those machines were just glacially slow at launching apps and really everything, like spell check, go get a coffee. I could immediately tell the difference between a 25Mhz Mac IIci and a 25Mhz Mac IIci with a 32KB cache card. That's how slow they were.
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Or controlling the heating and AC systems at 19 schools under its jurisdiction using a system that sends out commands over short-wave radio frequencies
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...
it’s also proof that Microsoft hasn’t done much with office in decades… except add bloat, tracking, spyware…
> old Office UI to the ribbon
Truly, I do not miss the swamp of toolbar icons without any labels. I don't weep for the old interface.
> Eventually I discovered that the problem isn't really the power of the computer.
Nope, that’s a modern problem. That’s what happens when the js-inmates run the asylum. We get shitty bloated software and 8300 copies of a browser running garage applications written by garbage developers.
I can’t wait to see what LLMs do with that being the bulk of their training.
Exciting!
not gonna disagree with you, but, as a solo developer who needs to reach audiences of all sorts, from mobile to powerful servers, the most reasonable choice today is Javascript. JS, with its "running environments" (Chrome, Node, etc.), has done what Java was supposed to do in the 90s. It's a pity that Java didn't hold its promises, but the blame is to put all on the companies that ran the show back then (and running the show now).
Javascript is not the problem at all.
Rookie developers who use hundreds of node modules or huge CSS frameworks are ruining performance and hurt the environment with bloated software that consumes energy and life time.
I used to run a cs1.6 server on an amd 800mhz with 256mb of ram in the 2000s. I'm looking these days to get a mac mini and while thinking that 16gb will not be enough I remembered about that server. It was a NAT gateway too, had a webserver also with hitstats for the cs server. And it was a popular 16v16 type of server too. What happened? How did we get to 16gb minimum and 32gb will make you not sad.
Try Plop Boot Manager: https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html
It can boot from a floppy or from a CD drive, and it lets you chainload into a live usb even on old computers.
I used it to boot from CD from a floppy in an old Pentium MMX and it worked great (although slow, of course)
> There is a herculean effort on the part of package maintainers to build software for distros, and no one has been building 32 bit version of software for years, even if it is possible to build from source. There is only a very limited set of software you can use, even CLI software because so many things are built with 64 bit dependencies
That seems odd? Debian 12 Bullseye (oldstable) has fully supported i386 port. I would expect it to run reasonably well on late 32 bit era systems (Pentium4/AthlonXP)
AFAIU the Debian i386 port has effectively required i686 level CPU's for quite a long time (CMOV etc.)? So if he has an older CPU like the Pentium it might not work?
But otherwise, yes, Debian 12 should work fine as you say. Not so long ago I installed it on an old Pentium M laptop I had lying around. Did take some tweaking, turned out that the wifi card didn't support WPA2/3 mixed mode which I had configured on my AP, so I had to downgrade security for the experiment. But video was hopeless, it couldn't even play 144p videos on youtube without stuttering. Maybe the video card (some Intel thing, used the i915 driver) didn't have HW decoding for whatever video encoder youtube uses nowadays (AV1?), or whatever.
You can force YouTube to use H264 instead (via extensions like H264ify), that should reduce the processing load.
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"There is a herculean effort on the part of package maintainers to build software for distros, and no one has been building 32 bit version of software for years, even if it is possible to build from source."
This statement must be Linux-only
Pre-compiled packages for i386 are still available for all versions of NetBSD including the current one
I still compile software for i386 from pkgsrc
https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/
NB. I'm not interested in graphical software, I prefer VGA textmode
NetBSD is probably what would make most sense to run on that old hardware.
Alternatively you may have accidently built a great machine for installing FreeDOS to run old DOS games/applications. It does install from USB, but needs BIOS so can't run it on modern PC hardware.
NetBSD is the only 32bit modern Unix still running like a charm on 32 bit hardware. OpemBSD is second with great wifi support.
I was on linux as my main driver in the early 2000s an we did watch movies back then, even DVDs. Of course, the formats where not HD and it was DivX or DVD ISOs. I remember running Gentoo and optimizing build flags for mplayer to get it working, at a time I had a 500Mhz Pentium III, later 850Mhz. And I also remember having to tweak the mplayer output driver params to get a good and smooth playback, but it was possible (mplayer -vo xv for Xvideo support). IIRC I got DVD .iso playback to run even on the framebuffer without X running at all (mplayer -vo fb). Also the "-framedrop" flag came in handy (you can do away with a bit less than 25fps when under load). Also, definitely you would need compile-time support for SSE/SSE2 in the CPU. I am not even sure I ever had a GPU that had video decoding support.
mpv and yt-dlp will fix that today.
You might have some luck applying isohybrid(1) to the period-correct .iso image, making it bootable by other means: https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/syslinux-utils/isohybrid...
My 32 bit laptop is a Thinkpad T42 from 2005 which has a functioning CDROM, and which can run Slackware15 stable 32bit install OKish, so I haven't tried any of this but:
My first thought: How about using a current computer to run qemu then mounting the Lenny iso as an image and installing to a qemu hard drive? Then dd the hard drive image to your 32bit target. (That might need access to a hard drive caddy depending on how you can boot the 32bit target machine, so a 'hardware regress' I suppose).
My second thought: If target machine is bootable from a more recent live linux, try a debootstrap install of a minimal Lenny with networking (assuming you can connect target machine to a network, I'm guessing with a cable rather than wifi). Reboot and install more software as required.
I have OpenBSD running on my old 2004 Centrino notebook (I might be lagging 2-3 versions behind, I don't really use it, just play around with it) and it's fine until you start playing YouTube videos, that is kinda hard on the CPU.
Yes, NetBSD and OpenBSD work fine on the 2005 T42 but as you say video performance is low. Recent OpenBSD versions have had to reduce the range of binary packages (i.e. outside of the base and installed with pkg_add) on i386 because of the difficulty of compiling them (e.g. Firefox, Seamonkey needing dependencies that are hard to compile on i386, a point the poster up thread made).
My ~/yt-dlp.conf:
My ~/.config/mpv/config
#inicio
Usage: mpv $YOUTUBE_URL
Upgrade ASAP.
I have a P166 under my desk and once in a blue moon I try to run something on it.
My biggest obstacles are that it doesn't have an ethernet port and that it doesn't have BIOS USB support (although it does have a card with two USB ports).
I've managed to run some small Linux distros on it (I'll definitely try this one), but, you're right, I haven't really found anything useful to run on it.
i had an original 7" eeepc from 2007, running archlinux-32 from ~2017, with Xfce and all that, and few months ago updated it.. took me almost a day, going through various rabbit-holes, like 1-2 static-built pacmans and python and manually picking and combining various versions. The result was okay but somehow took more space than before (it has 4G ssd, from which i did have 2gb free, now only 1.5). But it maybe that is not old enough as machine..
It seems that both OpenBSD [1] and NetBSD [2] still support i386, for example here [3] you can find the image for a USB stick.
I expect at least the base system (including X) to work without big issues (if your hardware is supported), for extra packages you may need a bit of luck.
[1] https://www.openbsd.org/plat.html
[2] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/
[3] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/i386/
>Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for 20 years
Little known fact; before 2006 all we did was play Pong and make beep-boop noises on our computers.
You can always run Linux off the dos partition with vmlinux loader. Or Slackware DOS version (forgot it's name).
Don't lose hope. You can boot it one way or other :)
loadlin ?
https://youpibouh.thefreecat.org/loadlin/
The last release of NetBSD still has drivers.