Looks like it can even run Windows 96. Incredibly cool. I'll have to try if it runs my old Slackware kernal 1.2.13 some time. I used it with a 4MiB, 25Mhz 386 DX back in the time, so it should.
Looks like it can even run Windows 96. Incredibly cool. I'll have to try if it runs my old Slackware kernal 1.2.13 some time. I used it with a 4MiB, 25Mhz 386 DX back in the time, so it should.
Did not realize that Win95 can technically run on a 20Mhz 386DX.
It "technically" can - i used Win95 on an AMD 386DX with 4MB of RAM back in the 90s for a little. Most of the time was spent waiting for the computer to do something while the HDD was constantly working.
The Pentium MMX with 32MB i replaced it with was MUCH faster, practically everything was instant.
I tried installing it on my 20mhz 486 IBM but the install never would finish even though the minimum specs listed 386. I always thought that was being too generous. I did use it on faster 486's at some point in school (I think 66mhz or faster?)
Yup, the RAM was the main bottleneck. 8MB was the minimum for Win9x, 16MB and above led to a fast experience.
Back in the mid 90’s I got it to “run” on a 386, but it was miserable. It was basically wondering if it was hung or just really slow on every command or mouse click.
Yes. I remember one of the MS guys saying the goal for win 95 was win32s equivalent performance on a 386 with 4 Mb ram. But win32s performance on that hardware was crap :)
> Win95 can technically run on a 20Mhz 386DX
s/technically/allegedly/
supposedly with a minimum of 4M RAM even! [1] I have a machine with twice that clock and twice that RAM that a friends parents wanted to toss out[2]. I spent the better part of a day getting Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3 to run. Playing around with it for a bit, I highly doubt that Windows 95 on minimum requirements would be anything but endlessly frustrating. I was not masochistic enough to try.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#System_requirements
[2] https://goliath32.com/hw/machines.html#pc386
I ran Windows 95 on a 386SX-16 with an 80387, with 5MB of ram for a year as my main machine. It ran about as well as 3.1 did. The only real drawback was the disk space required for 95 over 3.1 + DOS.
Good question. I ran Slackware Linux and DOS 5.0 on mine. I think Win95 was my Pentium 100 MHz already so it sounds a bit sus, but the FAQ section of OP had items about Win95, that is where I got the idea from.
We had Win95 running on a 25MHz 4MB FPRAM 286 back in high school. Poor teacher, half of first period was roughly how long it took to boot up, only for them to exit into DOS mode because the grading software and report card software was DOS-native and would hang if you tried running it under the GUI.
You certainly did not, as Win95 requires 32-bit, 80386 or better. 286 was a 16-bit CPU.
Windows 95 had a beta build for 286 systems, which is what this system 'ran.'
Bet you don't even know about Windows 97.
> Windows 95 had a beta build for 286 systems, which is what this system 'ran.'
I think you are confused. There was an Windows 95 build 286, but despite its name it didn't run on a 286 – it was just an incrementing counter which happened to have reached that number.
https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_95_build_286
At some point early in Windows 95's development, Microsoft dropped the standard-mode only 286 kernel, KRNL286.EXE. They also dropped 16-bit-only standard mode from KRNL386.EXE; but KRNL386.EXE required a 386 even for standard mode.
The earliest leaked Windows 95 build, build 22, still has KRNL286.EXE in it, but it is unchanged from Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and doesn't actually work – other Windows 95 components require new APIs which Microsoft added to KRNL386 but didn't bother adding to KRNL286. By the time we get to build 286, KRNL286 was long gone.
https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_95_build_22
In principle, you could likely patch early Windows 95 builds to run on a 286, but I don't think anyone has actually tried. At a minimum, you'd need to add the missing APIs to KRNL286.EXE
Taking you at your word, I suspect what you may have actually saw was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calmira – an open source project which gives Windows 3.x a Windows 95-style interface – or if not Calmira, other people implemented the same idea independently, e.g. the shareware Mask98 package – http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php?t=1262&view=min – however, this had nothing to do with Microsoft; Microsoft could have done something like this, but they had no commercial interest in doing so.
> Bet you don't even know about Windows 97.
That is just an unofficial/unlicensed third-party distro of Windows 3.11 with Calmira bundled.
https://crustywindo.ws/Windows_97
Separately, "Windows 97" was also what Microsoft once planned to call "Windows 98", but they weren't able to finish it in time to release it in 1997
It did not and it wouldn't have made any sense. By the time Windows 95 came out 286 systems were obsolete. They could barely run Windows 3.
(slackware) Just need to find where you stored all 20 floppy disks...
I think it came with two 3.5" disks, a bootdisk and a rootdisk, as well as two CDs. One was the actual distro, the other a sunsite mirror.
At least that is what I remember and while that memory might be hazy I know exactly where my precious is.
I definitely remember installing it off 20+ floppies onto a 386 back in the day. Most of the disks contained packages and you didn't need to install all of them though.
IIRC Emacs took up a significant number of disks
To be fair, that's pretty much an entire operating system. Just one that lacks its own kernel. It even takes a while to boot up!
Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping
Eight Megabytes would be a feature, these days.
Early releases of Slackware were only floppy. The boot/root CD release came later. I fondly recall wasting hours in a computer lab @ university using 20 Sun Sparcstation 2 floppy drives to write the slackware floppies for me and my friend. Walking out with a brick of floppies was pure bliss (achievement unlocked).
I don't know if they have some kind of magically genius caching system but the chip only has 512kb of SRAM and a little cache and the rest has to be managed by flash memory which is like 30+ times slower so I dunno about the performance of that.
The boards using this chip typically have 8 MB of PSRAM from what I've seen.
yeah but the PSRAM is going to cause a delay
it's not that bad. At 120MHz, the PSRAM still gets only around 90-100ns per word in the worst case. If you use some SRAM for caching and do bulk transfers, you can get that down quite a bit. Also you can easily overclock the PSRAM to 133MHt (10 decrease in latency) with no problem, maybe even (much?) more.
normal dynamic RAM back then was at 60-70 ns so it's really not that bad. And YT videos show that it also works fine in practice