A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB | Hacker News Reader

A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

liliputing.com

374 pointsgooseyard207 comments

As a nerd of a certain age I’ve been deeply attracted to retro computing. Even going so far as to place bids on 30 year old Atari STs on eBay since that was a computer I had in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s. But in recent days, through the use of modern emulators I’ve dabbled in these retro systems and I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re just bad. They are fine for the enjoyment of certain games and reliving or just getting a reminder of my younger years. Yet these home computers of that era lack so much. No MMU, no FPU, no IP networking. Very limited CPU cycles and memory.

Even switching from home computers of the era to workstation class system, it’s pure frustration at the limits on what can be done. Don’t get me wrong, for a lot of my computing needs I could probably get along just fine with a next cube or a late model Mac II. But on the other hand you’ll pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for these systems, while I can go on Amazon and spend ~$200 for a mouse, keyboard, cheap monitor, and a raspberry pi zero w and I’ll have a more capable system in every way. For just a little more money I can buy a tiny PC that is able to emulate near perfectly all the computers of my youth.

Thank you for attending my Ted talk.

nearly all of the old stuff just sucked. there's a reason we threw it all away (for the most part) and have turned to emulation.

the new low power SoC systems with actual connectivity are much more interesting... probably why they can barely keep the stuff in stock. as a bonus, they can run emulation just fine. old, and new, in one package.

I feel the same way about computers of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. I owned several of them, used them a lot (mostly programming for fun), and much of the experience just sucked. I do not understand the appeal of retrocomputing. But I'm happy that there are a lot of options for people who like that sort of thing.

"I do not understand the appeal of retrocomputing."

But at least one knew what was going on. If one didn't then one could probe the hardware with a logic analyzer and an oscilloscope. Try that today and see how far you get.

Mind you, the 8088 was a dog of a processor, too little too late and far tooooo slow (nobbling the 8086 was a dumb retrograde idea).

Yeah, using an 8088 in this thing seems dumb. My first thought when seeing this was: put a 386 or 486 with VGA in this and I would buy one. This would be instantly useful for retrogaming. 8088 with CGA, not so much (for me at least).

My thoughts exactly, especially the 486. It was a good all-rounder, worked well—thoroughly debuged unlike the Pentium—and fast enough to be useful even today for some work.

Also, I'd heard accounts that some influential third parties (companies developing stuff for the military etc.) were still using it long past its used-by date because it was the last of the 86 line whose internals they could fully understand. IBM was second-sourcing it too.

Incidentally, I wonder where those 8088s come from, same for the 8087. Seems someone still makes them.

Edit: Just occurred to me the main/intended use for this computer is as a training aid. The ready access to the chips and that they've sockets for removal would allow access for an ICE (In Circuit Emulator) bond-out chip/board to be inserted. Thus, there's no need for it to run any faster.

It's an OKI M80C88A-2, and the genuine Intel 8087.

Thanks. Presumably for use embedded in their hardware products. A genuine 8087 must mean Intel still makes them or there's a lot of old new stock around.

Depends what you're looking for. I have fond memories of programming an 8088 in high school with BASICA and Turbo Pascal. I could definitely see getting this to play around with. A 486 could do more but it wouldn't take me back to my roots in quite the same way.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug

One thing that didn't suck that we threw away was 4:3 screens though.

And chunky plastic builds with easily user-replaceable parts.

And nice full 7 row keyboards that felt good to type on.

And rounded laptop edges so it doesn't kill your wrists.

And ports, lots of ports.

> 4:3 screens

The 16:9 craze drives me mad: it's jack of all trades master of none, compromise every other way. Maybe nice to watch TV shows, not really good to watch movies, not tall enough for a single screen, not wide enough to 50:50 split left/right (each side is too narrow). Putting two side by side makes you face the bezels, and constant-tilt your head either left or right when you focus. Three side by side is way too wide. Probably why some folks put three but have the two outmost ones be vertical. Which brings me to 9:16 which is way too thin AND tall.

A triple head 4:3 setup was terrible for movies, but reaaaally nice for a battlestation. Maybe 5:4 would have been quite something but I never experienced that.

I do like the Ultrawide things though, 2.4:1 feels like two 4:3, only continuous, no bezel in the middle. 3.5:1 is technically about two 16:9 but feels like triple head 4:3. They're especially comfortable when curved, but damn, none are HiDPI, which kind of ruins it. And of course that's kind of a no-go for laptops (or maybe not, but I bet the manufacturer attempting that would somehow botch the execution)

I actually do use three 24" 16:9 screens, side by side. Though small by anyone else's standards, 24" is sort of the perfect size for the three monitor setup. It doesn't make me strain my neck _too_ much, but also isn't so gargantuan that I can't fit three on my 5-foot desk.

I split each monitor down the middle, treating it essentially as a viewport for two windows. Optionally I sometimes fill one screen with a single window, but I never overlap screens. On my home computer running Linux (Cinnamon) this functionality is built in; on my work laptop running macOS, I use Rectangle to accomplish the same thing.

I did have three 19" 4:3 CRTs, way back when - beautiful Sun Trinitrons. They took up the entire desk, but I could conveniently stack equipment on top of them (speakers, a clock, an FM radio, etc), because they were so large. But my workflow for those was different - each monitor _was_ a single window, as splitting them resulted in windows that were too narrow to be useful.

16:10 is the widely available sweet spot. That small bit of extra height makes a world of difference.

The 3:2 displays available on Surface tablet devices are also great, although my Surface Go is a tad small for more than one window at a time.

Agreed!

In my experience, a big enough 16:9 display also works as a 4:3 in practice – a 55” 4K OLED TV is great for this. It’s like a 2880 × 2160 4:3 display… with three little 960x720 4:3 displays next to it, heh. Window managers can enforce the split. It’s nice!

I used a single large TV for my monitor for a couple of years. At first I used a 50” 4K LCD TV. Some aspects of this were very nice. As you describe, being able to split the screen up into multiple areas or use a portion of the screen as a monitor with different aspect ratios was very nice. The downside with the LCD was the backlight on the areas of the display that weren’t in active use was very distracting. It was also nice having the flexibility for games, watching TV and movies.

I briefly tried my 65” LG OLED TV as my monitor. It didn’t have the backlight problem at all but the auto dimming of white screen areas was too distracting to be usable.

I’ve now gone to 2x 32” 4K monitors. It’s okay but either too wide if both monitors are horizontal or one is too tall if I turn one vertical.

I’d like to revisit using a large OLED again when their use as monitors has matured a little. With a little software tweaking for window management, it was almost perfect.

i use a sony 48" oled and yeah, the only annoying thing is the auto dimming. otherwise it's fine. i may buy an oled actual-monitor (they're starting to be released now...) once this one dies, but my previous sony (non-oled) led tv monitor lasted 6 years so it could be a while.

There an easy fix for the sharp edges on laptops: don't buy macbooks.

Nearly any desktop has user-replaceable parts, and so do many laptops. Laptops get to be compact and lightweight, so they are very tight internally. An Amiga wasn't too easily portable, to say nothing of an Amstrad.

Keyboard quality differed drastically: an Amiga or a Yamaha MSX had nice keys, but good luck typing on a Spectrum ZX.

The repairability depends on the laptop. Framework is the obvious choice if you want a lot of control over the device hardware, but I was pleasantly surprised at how many user-serviceable parts were in my HP Aero 13. Battery, m.2 storage, RAM, wifi card, input devices, screen, speakers, webcam, etc.

Plenty of mech keyboards feel great to type on.

Have been enjoying Lenovo's rolling out of 16:10 displays, it isn't 4:3 but it is still better than 16:9

not always because they sucked.

Some were replaced by cheaper, easy to mass produce but somewhat inferior products.

Others by some insane reasons by manufacturers to increase their profits or differentiate amongst themselves, pushing for thinner, lighter devices. i would gladly use bulkier devices for better specs and reparability.

I dunno about the ST but my Amiga 1200 very much has an FPU and and IP network. I would be very surprised if that wasn’t something that you could add to an ST as well.

Amiga 1200 is in the ballpark of Atari TT/Falcon and yes STing for IP, browsers etc. were available. But ST was same year as Amiga 1000 which also had just MC68000 without MMU, both Commodore engineers (who designed... Atari ST) and Atari engineers (who designed in HiToro Lorreline - than then became Amiga) had own external MMU.

It always stuck with me when announcing the Virtual Console on Wii U that Satoru Iwata said it perfectly "It can be fun to relive your childhood but just for a little while".

It is fun to look back but we tend to forgive a lot of things that kind of sucked. It is like how some people who live through Hurricanes and then a decade later speak about how fun it was coming together even though it was just horrible. Memories can be deceiving.

"When you wear rose tinted glasses, red flags just look like flags" - Bojack Horseman

Definitely, I always felt just a tinge of bad for how awful I was at the original Super Mario brothers. The NES and SNES games. After playing them on the classic consoles as an adult I realized they were just unforgiving and let my youthful self forgive that. I’ve done much better on the newer Mario games. SMB3 though really does shine.

There's even a name for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_hard

The difficulty helped hide the fact that you were paying $50 in 1980s money for a game that took approximately an hour to beat. If you could beat it. But I suspect the more common gameplay loop was the one I and my friends encountered: you put the game in, played for 20-35 minutes, got a Game Over. If you were really motivated maybe you tried again and got to Stage 4 instead of Stage 3, but at some point said, screw it, turned the game off, and played something else.

These days every game is made with the intention that it can and should be beaten, which is part of why there's so much needless padding in games to stretch them out beyond the 40-hour mark and make the player feel like they're getting "value" for their money.

Much of this design also feels like a hangover from the arcade days where you wanted players to die cheap deaths so they plugged more quarters into the machine.

I think all of those games were offered as arcade boxes. Plus you have to figure the audience then was in that sort of mindset. Very good point. My 4-5 year old self can relax at last.

Sometimes they were also made harder so it couldn't be beaten on a rental encouraging you to buy the game.

I remember saving for months to buy each game. Would get 1 for birthday and Christmas. So a new game maybe every 3 months on average.

3 months on the same game and you get good at it. Do this several times and you need a hard game to not just finish it an hour.

Super Mario Bros 3 is the BEST Mario, imo

For what it's worth, as a born and raised Floridian, hurricanes are always fun before (laughing as people panic buy, watching the track, wondering if it will turn at the last moment or unexpectedly linger on top of you), during (admiring the wind/rain, wondering if we'll have to run the generator this year), and after (marvelling at the damage, having a good excuse to run the chainsaw, wondering when we can stop running the generator); and that's not even considering how much fun road trips can be when you have to evacuate.

OTOH, maybe I'm just weird.

They're fun right up until you lose your house, or someone you know dies.

It could be just a stage of denial as in the 5 stages.

Or it could go deeper and as the world around us always change, by event we cannot determine and affect us totally … like say death and we have several possible path

Subject - actively deal with it - actively not deal with it - inactively deal with it - inactively not deal with it

Ignore us as subject - let others deal with it - …

Many religions and life philosophies are around this for, well, death.

Death is sad, but it comes to us all one way or the other. Death by hurricane can be mostly avoided by leaving for significant storms and direct hits, but I know several folks who have had very close calls (e.g., tree fell through the roof and clobbered the bed while they were eating dinner) even in light, non-hurricane storms.

Losing the house sucks, but that's why we carry insurance. Any Florida house worth its salt (a unfortunately dwindling percentage due to significant development in recent years) is CBC and isn't likely to take significant damage unless you lose the roof or take a direct hit from a tree or tornado.

Not to refute your (accurate) statement, just to offer my perspective.

That Iwata quote kind of rubs me the wrong way, especially with Nintendo and Sony releasing extremely flawed emulators in the past. On top of games designed for CRT TVs often not looking as good on modern screens, we have emulators introducing low FPS and jerkiness (Sony PSone Classic) or making games look worse by rendering certain scenes without fog (Switch Online N64). With commercial emulation of early 3D consoles especially, you often just aren't getting an accurate representation of what the games were actually like.

(Although credit where credit is due, Nintendo's recent Game Boy Advance releases ship in one of most accurate GBA emulators around.)

What's funny is they both had much better emulators in the past. The PS3/PSP/Vita PS1 emulator is pretty good, ditto the Wii's N64 emulator. The Wii U's was a step back, so was the Switch's although they've worked on it.

>No MMU, no FPU, no IP networking. Very limited CPU cycles and memory.

Isn't that the whole point?

lol true. Although I would say: MMU bad, FPU good, IP bad. ;)

An FPU is an option though

But what is it that you want to do with these retro computers beside playing Wolf3D? As you mentioned even the most basic of RPi can run the pants of the Atari ST machines, so it is hardly a fair usage of the computer if you want to do modern tasks.

I think I will always start my sentences with "As a nerd of a certain age," now. It will give so much more context to all my conversations :)

They are fine for the enjoyment of certain games and reliving or just getting a reminder of my younger years. Yet these home computers of that era lack so much. No MMU, no FPU, no IP networking. Very limited CPU cycles and memory.

People just had more patience back then.

45 minutes to LHARC my text file? Sure, I'll talk to my wife.

Four hours to download an ILBM? OK. I'll read a book.

Today we're so used to living at the business end of a digital firehose that if something takes too many clock cycles we walk away. Some people can't even sit in a chair in their own homes without having music on.

That 95% of the retro computing scene seems devoted to games tells me that people just crave a quick hit of digital content and then move on.

But the point of such devices is emphatically not daily computing. It's like saying you can go and buy a more evenly colored, stronger, cheaper, and less fiddly brick instead of a Rubik cube.

Equally, to me the point of devices like this, or fantasy consoles, or old limited machines is in being a puzzle, providing an intellectually stimulating pastime. Spending time on them is more fun and likely more useful in various senses than activities like solving Sudoku or watching TV.

It depends upon what you're trying to achieve.

To run software, emulation is great. To develop software, emulation is great. Anything that deals directly with hardware, well, emulation isn't going to cut it.

Then there are the other reasons, ones that have nothing to do with the hardware itself. Personally, I use vintage computers as an escape from modern computers and as a reminder of what the technology could have been. I'm not talking about it being slow, unreliable, or downright difficult to manage. I'm thinking more along the lines of being simple enough to understand and a lot more personal. A lot of what we call progress is a mixed bag. Yes, the performance of modern computers is amazing and it comes at the cost of complexity. On the other hand, we have a lot of complexity that is not necessary for day to day use. Yes, having access to a literal world of information at our fingertips is amazing. On the other hand, our computers are also at the whim of the outside world. In other words, there are a lot of tradeoffs.

For some things, emulation is the perfect solution. For other things, it simply won't work.

Early software was designed to feel as fast as possible, even resorting to hacks like temporarily turning off DRAM refresh to write text on the screen as quickly as possible. Though hardware was very limited, when you pressed a key you generally got a response right away.

Fast forward to 2023, and everything runs on top of a non-realtime multitasking OS, causing periodic little glitches as background stuff hogs up resources. Graphics is too complicated to guarantee consistent 60 frames per second. And web is incrementally loaded from shared servers, often with delays of many seconds. Animations introduce intentional lag.

Modern hardware could be of course amazing at being fast, but nobody put in the effort into software designed for that goal. Plus obsession with device thinness and fanless designs introduces thermal throttling that no software can overcome.

> Modern hardware could be of course amazing at being fast, but nobody put in the effort into software designed for that goal.

A lot of effort has being thrown that way, it's just that their definition of "go fast" is "having lots of throughput", not the things you are looking for: goodput, low latency, low jitter.

We got faster mainframes instead of faster minicomputers - computers and network systems that are optimized at doing batch jobs.

We can submit a whole bunch of blocks and the graphics processing unit can display accelerated smooth video for us. Or we can push a whole neural network to a tensor processing unit and have it do inference in very few operations, after the model is loaded. But both of those operations while having smooth output have horrible startup latency.

I think is very naive to call what the devices have today as a "single computer" when in fact, for a long while they're several interconnected computer components joined with lots of buffer.

This is why I refuse to so my retro computing on anything without a floating point co processor. As such the 486 DX/2 66 mhz is ideal. Not too fast. But crazy powerful compared to rubbish 8086 machines.

A "real hardware" approach to retrocomputing like displayed here appeals to me because it much better captures parts of the experience lost to emulation. Things like insanely low latency thanks to there not being a fractal spiral of hardware and software abstractions sitting between everything. It's much more simple, and you can feel that.

That said I'd also like to see some modern advancements brought in… for example a reproduction of a mid-90s 68k or PPC Mac using components manufactured on a much smaller node would be incredible. It wouldn't even have to be anything cutting edge like 3/5nm — even the now-ancient 14nm or 30nm would be amazing compared to say the 350nm node that the PowerPC 603ev was manufactured on.

One of the nicest screens I have ever used was on a monochrome ega laptop.

Sure, the pixels were huge and slow, but the contrast ratio was really good without it being too bright. It’s hard to explain why it was so good. I suspect it was a bit transflective.

The problem with those old monochrome/greyscale LCDs is that they were horrendous for ghosting.

I imagine if you just wanted an old laptop for wordstar or something, they’d be amazing due to their clarity; but I remember trying to play commander keen on them and getting a headache.

Thanks for the flashback! Got my first own computer from my grandfather. It was a 486 laptop with a bulitin trackball and floppy drive. The display was as you described. Movement on the screen was just a blurry mess.

I'm also bummed out that these sorts of things are all including OPL2/OPL3 Adlib style clones when I'd much rather have Sound Blaster support with the digital audio channel.

Fair point, but in this case (4mhz 8088) I think it doesn't really have the guts to play 16 bit stereo digital audio?

Update: apparently there's a hacky way to play digital audio through these FM synth chips, and several games and music players for DOS do just this.

It says this card is sound blaster pro 2.0 compatible if I understand it correctly. Of course on.aliexpress a lot is lost in translation.

One thing I'd love to see is a Pentium III class machine with a lot of cache and ram with a pcie SSD in pocket size. I feel like those machines were held back by hard drives of their day.

Look into things using the Vortex86DX3.

That sounds a lot like the Atom/Pentium 4000 based 7” notebooks you can find online from the usual large retailers.

Asus Eee 901?

> mid-90s 68k or PPC Mac using components manufactured on a much smaller node would be incredible.

Why not just use an FPGA?

As I understand, there’s limits to the efficiency that can be achieved with FPGAs which makes them less than amazing for usage in e.g. laptops.

That said, the 8088 wasn't 3nm, it was 3µm.

> fractal spiral of hardware and software abstractions

I've often used "onion", but this is much more accurate :)

The latency issue is very real. I work in Linux, Mac and Windows on fairly fast computers and programming in VSCode is so annoying because of the latency . On my 486 in Borland Turbo C++ ide, I click on a key and I see it instantaneous.

Of course if you never tried it, you wouldn't notice the difference and think I have some sort of OCD. But it is really noticable. I don't know if it's 100ms or 200 ms but there is a difference.

Trying any editor other than VSCode might help; it’s notoriously slow.

Emacs is the same. I'm not talking about slow loading time or changing tabs which I understand. It's the act of clicking on a key.

Emacs? Keyboard lag? Is that with some kind of LSP or other itegration?

I find that Emacs keyboard responsiveness on text (on a 17 year old core duo laptop) is indistinguishable from vi or nano.

What they're getting at is that the latency is caused by overhead from the OS and USB, increasing it across the board regardless of editor — each keystroke has more layers to pass through compared to a machine from the 70s, 80s, or 90s, plus USB by the nature of how it works unavoidably adds latency that's variable depending on CPU load, since USB is CPU-dependent. There's also more layers in the display stack, increasing the amount of time it takes for what's actually displayed on screen to match machine state.

A Core 2 Duo era laptop specifically might not suffer as much as its desktop counterpart though, because laptops from that era often used PS/2 for their internal keyboard+trackpad connection and thus don't suffer USB latency increases unless the laptop's motherboard was doing something weird like implementing PS/2 via an onboard adapter attached to the USB bus.

Well, maybe web and javascript is not the best tool to create an IDE with.

Do you feel the same latency with eg. Notepad++, Qt Creator, or Kate?

Get a high refresh rate (<1ms latency) LCD/LED monitor. This is by far the most important. It took a while to catch up to CRT latency, and it's still sold as a niche product, but we are there.

If you are in Linux, you may want to turn off your display compositor (KDE/XFCE), or use a lightweight xorg window manager like fluxbox or i3. This isn't necessary when using a fast GPU, but even then you may dislike animations.

Use a text editor with a real GUI toolkit (not electron or similar) like emacs or gvim/nvim-qt. Unfortunately, emacs can struggle rendering syntax highlighting, but outside that it is lean and snappy. Hopefully the recent progress with tree-sitter will resolve that.

I have met very few people who care about latency the way I do. I think most of it comes from my nostalgia of DOS-era computing. The most satisfying hardware purchase I have ever made is a good looking 2K IPS/VA 120hz/144hz+ freesync display. Millions of hours of my life experience were noticeably improved.

I'm looking forward to the day that display tech, GPUs, and connection standards have gotten to the point that high PPI (@2x UI scaling) high refresh rate microLED displays are practical. It's going to be so nice to have text with as much contrast, cripsness, and accurate letterforms as print with as little latency as is possible on a modern system.

It's not as comfortable as print, due to backlighting, but you just described the phone screen I'm typing this comment on.

I really hate Liliputing. After browsing, I somehow have several tiny laptops that I don't need but truly love like the Magic Ben MAG1 and the Pomera DM30.

And Jetpens. I hate Jetpens too. I can't believe how many...

I never heard of Jetpens before but I'm excited to see they sell what is essentially colossal, unbranded Altoids tins https://www.jetpens.com/Velos-Tin-Pen-Case-Wide/pd/14193

lol, not a bad price, what excites you about it tho?

Altoids tins are pretty strong, small enough to be handy and cheap. This makes them the ideal container for a lot of small electronics projects, but a pi doesn't quite fit. I see it as a perfect small electronics container which you can pull out and use on the go.

hmmm gives me an idea, thanks

back in high schools I had a zen micro mp3 player that fit snugly inside an altoids tin, drilled a hole for the headphone jack and felt pretty stylish.

fyi these kinds of pen cases have been popular in asia and asian communities worldwide for decades, usually for carrying mechanical pencils and their accessories (extra lead, erasers, protractors, rulers, mini notebooks, sticky pads, whatever)

western equivalent would be trapper keepers with their pencil pouches.

You can also probably get little pencil boxes at an art store or some place like that.

Would recommend. A little plastic box that prevents me from having to fish around in my backpack possible get poked when I want my pencil is great, and they are pretty cheap.

Speaking of fishing, this is slightly adjacent, but fishing tackle boxes come in a wide variety of sizes, are built to be modified, and are easily open to additional modification since the plastic is soft. And they are cheap.

UK: Try an image search for 'Helix Oxford Maths Set'

Compasses, dividers, protractor, setsquares (that we don't use these days) and a 15cm ruler. Pencils, sharpener, rubber. Usually a stencil for lettering and a leaflet with geometry definitions.

Available from supermarkets, stationers and cash and carrys right now because it is GCSE Maths exam time.

Overkill for me, but it does look quite nice!

I would love to see a list of all the websites you hate.

As the owner of an obscure floppy disk subsystem that requires an 8-bit ISA card and was originally spec'ed to run on XT-class hardware, this is tempting.

In particular, 640 kB really is enough, as the bundled software runs in real mode, doesn't support extended or expanded memory, and predates tricks like loading DOS in high memory by a number of years (not that they'd work on an XT in any case).

The disk read/write code and some of the simpler filesystem modules run on the ISA card itself, essentially an 8085-based SBC with a rather flexible (no pun intended) floppy controller. Here, 64 kB is necessarily enough for everything.

The fun part is that, assuming an Intel MDS 80/ISIS-compatible toolchain, the card can easily be coerced to run arbitrary code. And, while working Intel "blue" hardware is thin on the ground, I have personal experience with at least one working emulator (MAME) able to run ISIS.

The creator of this machine also made a palmtop 386 - https://youtu.be/JI71ELzd498 .

They're both beautiful machines!

I found them a couple of days ago, and the 386 was already sold out. I was hoping to eventually pick up one of the 8088s; but it looks like they'll disappear now too.

I ordered a HAND 386 before it was removed from sale. The order hasn’t shipped yet and I’m trying to not get my hopes up too much that it will actually ship. I was going to use it was a portable testbench for my RP2040-based ISA card emulation projects.

I just checked, and you can buy a new Intel 8086 on digikey right now: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/rochester-electro...

The product is not even marked obsolete.

For $95?? Looks like there are equivalents for $10 available, though.

IIRC, A lot of old chips are basically kept in small batch production for military, aviation, etc, hardware that needs parts repairing or replacing.

It's not straight from Intel, it's from a company called Rochester Electronics that buys EOL chip IP from a bunch of different companies and then makes their products available for legacy devices. They also make Motorola 6809s and 68000s.

I’m very sure 8086s are still used in Avionics suites for most commercial planes (FMS/MCDUs) as it costs way too much to recertify constantly.

Rochester Electronics marks them as obsolete. I doubt these are brand new, more than likely they are old stock.

DOS emulation is not a very battery-efficient way to play '88-98 games on the go, so projects like these seem to cater to that specific need, letting people run DOS natively. The Toshiba Libretto was a nice, small machine, but finding one in good condition is super hard. Toshiba Portégé was another, but after Pentium-II models, they took away the OPL3 card in favor of something more Windows-friendly (AC97), which doesn't have good DOS drivers. Now there's SBEMU (https://github.com/crazii/SBEMU), which can emulate SB/SBPRO/SB16 on top of newer PCI-based sound cards, including AC97 ones, solving that problem. Now it's possible to have sound on a Pentium-II, III, M and Atom machines running DOS, like a Sony Vaio P.

Have you tested SBEMU? I wonder how well or hassle-free it works in reality. I'm interested in creating a SvarDOS [1] machine for some tasks, inclding some low-end audio processing, probably with some custom "program".

1: http://svardos.org/

Some folks on YouTube have it running on laptops running FreeDOS. It’s not perfect, but many games seem to work.

> DOS emulation is not a very battery-efficient way to play '88-98 games on the go

They don't mention the battery capacity or specific 8086 variant used but modern ones use to average 2W of consumption; there are zero power saving modes; and the guy even says that when using 8087 the mini-laptop must "be plugged in all the time".

So I rather doubt real hardware is the most efficient way, specially when e.g. with virtualization you can easily have 20+ hours of DOS on a subnotebook.

20+ hours playing games with audio support on a VM? I’d love to see that kind of performance on, say, the GPD Win 4, but it sounds exaggerated. Where could I find this?

Just a heads up, it looks like these guys ripped off Serge Kiselev's 8088 BIOS [1].

[1] https://github.com/skiselev/8088_bios

Well:

A) it’s a cheap Chinese device, I’m certain some stolen open source code is the least of its infringements.

B) it’s licensed GPL, if they made no code changes (however doubtful) they didn’t really rip anything off.

They removed his copyright string from it

If the code is GPL and you are distributing the code in object form, then it’s okay to remove copyright notices as long as the work carried “prominent notices stating that it is released under [the GPL]”. GPL v3 section 5. [0]. Basically, that section says that if you’re distributing modified code, you’re not required to “keep intact all notices”. Id.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

Copying isn't stealing.

It is stealing if they change all the copyright notices

Not if it’s GPL v3 and the code still “carries prominent notices” stating that it’s licensed under the GPL v3. See my other reply. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36024341

> Unfortunately there’s no information on the battery capacity or battery life, but the little computer works with a 12V/1.5A power supply.

Let's be real for a moment; you wouldn't be getting a true vintage mobile computing experience if you weren't tethered to an electrical socket!

Boy, does this bring back some good memories of the Toshiba Libretto:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_Libretto

I bought one on the gray market in 1996, and I think I managed to double my money in about 6 months by reselling it within the US. It was supremely handy to have around, but with only one PCMCIA slot you had to choose between wired networking and a CD-ROM drive.

Wow. I haven't thought of these in years. Always wanted one.

I have one I'm not using. My email is in my profile.

I’m convinced that just like how humans are attracted to little kittens and puppies, some technophiles easily feel the same attraction to small, harmless looking little computers running tiny software on tiny processors. I feel like buying this even though I have zero need for it.

I had a similar device in my hands 15 years ago in Thailand, with the company making it trying to find a market when OLPC was getting all the press. It was a netbook with a low power 386 compatible CPU and just enough circuitry and support to drive the keyboard, screen, some RAM and the SD card serving as the hard drive, and USB. It booted DOS, and in theory could have run Linux. It was powered by 6 AA batteries. They might have been able to produce them in bulk for $100 USD at the time, but I suspect it would have been more like $200. Didn't go anywhere as far as I know.

I had an HP 200LX that was way cooler than this thing back in the late 90s and ran DOS, Lotus 123, etc.

Still some vintage used ones around:https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...

So close. But as others mentioned why not something like vga or at least ega and 286? You could still run 80s still but you could then also do a space quest v and some of later Lucas arts games... Which embarrassingly would make it a must have for me even though I own 27 copies of them on GoG and steam and bundle and cd and wherever :)

465 is a sweet spot for me between being retro and being more capable (e. g. it would allow to run many games from early 90s).

Curious. Why do we need an actual 8088? Aren't all x86 processors backwards compatible with 8088/8086? Also last time I checked VGA cards supported legacy modes such as CGA, and EGA (this may not be the case anymore).

Any modern Intel laptop should be able to run the same software, without emulation.

The end goal of this product isn't to run software, it's to hold a piece of history in your hands and play with it and revel in that feeling.

I get it, but this is not a piece of history per se. It was manufactured last week. Like any other x86 laptop.

Well the CPU and peripheral chips are historic.

Any modern Intel laptop should be able to run the same software, without emulation.

Unfortunately not, UEFI-only BIOSes and locked-down bootloaders are a thing today.

Is there something wrong with using a VM?

In theory, no, but if you're using an AMD Ryzen CPU, there's some nasty bugs related to VME instructions (which AMD appears to have no intention of fixing) that break some DOS-based applications, including Windows 3, 9x, and probably the other DOS-based Windows versions as well but I never tried them. NT-based Windows works, though early versions do not perform as well as they do on Intel (my R7 1700 and 5700X run Windows 2000 VMs worse than my old i5-6600...I wish I was joking).

Good to know! You could run qemu without hardware virtualization. For old apps, I doubt you'll notice the performance loss.

Yes. The emulation is not even 80 % acurrate. Especially keyboard interraction is problematic. Then the VM seems to stutter.

This is x86, not ARM.

If you aren't booting quite literally whatever the hell you want you aren't x86'ing right.

The OPL3 addon is a nice addition that doesn't work on new hardware without emulation.

There are subtle differences with newer CPUs such as: the 8086 does not AND shift operands with 31 while the 80186 and newer do. Not sure if it matters much for compatibility, just some trivia.

Source: 80186 hardware refence manual, appendix A "Differences between the 80186 family and 8086/8088"

Seems like a great distraction-free writing machine.

Likely doesn’t support anything except 8-bit encodings, so only suitable if you’re writing in English without fancy punctuation like em-dashes

You should be able to switch encodings/codepages in DOS; 8-bit encodings cover many languages, and includes "fancy punctuation". Even the default cp437 covers quite a few of the languages in Latin script.

This editor [1][2] supports Unicode.

[1] http://www.texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Blochek

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20221113215247/http://laaca.sweb....

EDIT: VGA only, though :-(

I would recommend an old Alphasmart

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart.

Way better battery life and ease of use with USB. It's my go to note and writing machine.

Funny to see planet x3 on the store images, a game made by youtuber 8-bit guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szhv6fwx7GY

Do they still manufacture 8088 ? Or perhaps someone found some new old stock and got entrepreneurial; I'd love to know the story behind this

Intel may not but I suspect someone somewhere still is. It’s a powerful microprocessor.

From the low resolution pics, it looks like a Oki Semiconductor M80C88A-2

Yes, at least the military version appears to still be in active production, but not cheap: https://www.rocelec.com/part/HARMD80C88-2-883

The 8087 too: https://www.rocelec.com/part/REILD8087

I suspect the ones in this laptop are either NOS or recycled, however.

Ouch. "Not cheap" didn't prepare me to see a per unit price of $1,329.27, or $1,222.92 for 1000+ batches.

I read your comment and thought that can't be a unit of 1, it must be a typo and a batch of 1000.

Then I clicked the link.

But that can't be. Don't they appear in all kinds of things now, from washing machines to fire alarms? So I checked Alibaba, which has 8088s from $0.3 - $2. [1]

I'm confused why the military version is three orders of magnitude more expensive.

[1] https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product...

Because military.

I doubt there's actual 8088s being used in consumer products; it's mostly military (and someone else mentioned avionics in another comment here) applications that require exact qualified parts, and can't be replaced with something else. Alibaba's are probably recycled or NOS.

9 out of 10 "new old stock" chips on sites like Alibaba are harvested from ewaste. The "recycling" process generally involves workers holding old circuit boards over open fires to melt the solder, and then banging the boards against the ground to knock the chips out. After that, the recyclers sand off the old chip markings, cover the tops of the chips with a tar-like material, and laser on new chip markings (this makes sure that when you buy 100 chips from a seller, they all have the same markings and date code). Since they're applying new markings, they can also take the liberty of making the chips into more expensive versions, such as by increasing the rated clock speed or by labeling consumer versions of chips as milspec or radiation hardened versions. This may be fine if you just want an old chip for a hobby project or something, but for repairing military equipment you want chips with a verifiable chain of custody.

In military/aerospace you're mostly paying for the paperwork, not anything physical.

I would like to have a modern version of 8088 with ability to consume few μW under full load and 100% compatibility with regular version.

The fact that it appears to use an actual 8088 (and 8087) is somewhat surprising, considering that the whole PC/XT that this model claims to be compatible with could probably be implemented on a single COB like what happened to the NES.

Also amusing is that the keyboard has a Windows key.

Why 8088? All the good DOS stuff requires at least a 286. You’re pretty much limited to extremely early 80s software with that.

Not true. Millions of dollars was spent on 8086 compatible software. Lotus 1-2-3 for example, and many programs bought new were 8086 compatible until windows finally took over.

386 with an ethernet port would be an insta-buy for me.

What they originally looked like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable

Does it run 8088 MPH?

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65371

Since it is presumably real hardware, it should, but it isn't a CRT, so the NTSC color bleeding trick to get extra colors may not work.

This is really cool but I would have targeted a 286 or 386 with EGA or VGA, not 8088 with CGA. The display used can do a lot more than that anyway and the 386 actually came in a smaller package.

I had an Ambra 486sx (IBM line) laptop that was so small and great. Seemed so ahead of its time, a netbook before it became a category. Google "Ambra laptop" shows a picture of an SN8660C which looks like what I had. Played Doom just fine on it. Even had the external dock that took PC/XT/AT expansion cards.

Just now I thought 8MB is still enough to be useful, then I checked myself MB not GB.

Is this really based on an 8088? I thought Windows 3.0 requires at least an 286

That was Windows 3.1, apparently

Windows 3.0 can run in real mode: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.0#System_requireme...

It looks like it has a decent keyboard with some travel, edged sides of keys, though despite having six rows lacks PgUp, PgDn, Home and End.

& Hilariously includes a Windows key despite not being able to run any version of Windows for which this key was introduced

Would be cool if there was a video out... Would be cooler if it was a 386.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hand-386-handheld

Man, I would kill for an out-of-the-box machine that's a tiny bit faster, with a bit more RAM, and has full Voodoo 2 support.

I know pcem can do a pretty decent job with voodoo these days, bit would be nice to have something that Just Works so I could play Messiah and Sinistar Unleashed in their full glory again.

I didn’t know the chip shortage had gotten this bad. :)

I still have a DOS based, off brand, laptop from the 90's. It can run the new and improved Windows 3.11. The auction is open. Place your bid. :)

> It does have a few modern touches, including a 512MB CompactFlash card for storage and a USB port for peripherals

Modern as in built for 2002?

Does it come on an IBM Microdrive?[^1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive

Imo its a nice laptop for writers that can run a basic but capable text editor with very little other things to distract you from writing.

Just look how expensive the fancy alternatives are:

https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-traveler

640KB really was enough

Not if you have Stacker.

Just add a 1TB NVMe and ditch Stacker. /s

How many cylinders, heads and sectors does the 1TB NVMe have?

2^n, 2^m, and 2^p, respectively.

I hear that there is a bleeding edge technology called (E)CHS these days.

Bad command or file name.

Inverse ramdisk?

For me, this is the new Raspberry.

This machine could be useful especially for testing. While emulators have their merits, usually competitions use real hardware.

I am into the C64 and Amiga demo scene, and did some stuff on PC DOS during the 90th. Testing becomes more and more important.

> For me, this is the new Raspberry

I think it's not really the same sort of thing. It's got a 4MHz CPU, for starters. I'm sure it's good for the exact cases you're mentioning, but the Raspberry Pi, even the W, is much more powerful and versatile.

I need similar but with at least 386, VGA and a soundcard. For to use this gem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastTracker_2

What a badass program it was!

I think that one ran out of stock: https://aliexpress.com/item/1005005537582724.html

> along with support for an optional 8087 math co-processor.

I'll take it with the co-processor.

Why so small? 24cm width wtf? Why not a full sized laptop? Screen will be basically invisible, size of a typical smartphone screen. Also 16:9 screen ratio will definitely work poorly with almost all nontrivial DOS apps.

Because that's what they had on hand (at the right price) to get rid of all that old hardware, I suspect.

I asked yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35993044#35993847

And this arrives today. Going to buy one.

Is there a turbo button?

It runs at the original "base" level (4.77MHz) so there's no Turbo to toggle :D

So cool. Besides, who would ever need more than 640 KB of RAM?

Keyboard looks like an oldschool Thinkpad. You can also get an older Thinkpad x220 for around the same cost or cheaper with more power.

Pointless with a 16:9 ratio display :(

Why can't they make the same thing but as a phone?

I'm desperate to have a cheap, open, frugal device that I can program easily that fit into my pocket.

I'm not willing to use Android studio just to make a simple app, or godot, or JavaScript or nodejs.

It's 2023 and Carmack is still right, there are way too many layers of crap, we just cannot use our phone like we want. It's awful.

It's such a paradox, smartphones are amazingly fast... But it's impossible to find something open and slow. Capitalism makes this impossible.

8088 chip does not include FPU, does this laptop has one, otherwise it is going to be very slow.

That's what the 8087 coprocessor option is for.

Very little is going to prevent this thing from being very slow.

It’s an 8088 running 4.77Mhz, on a not really great system architecture. Head to head the original PC was slower than competing Z80s at 4Mhz.

The truly singular advancement the 8088 brought was more precious, precious memory. The PC itself was a different phenomenon. What it lacked in performance it made up for in many other ways.

For most applications, particularly early on, the 8087 did not bring a lot to the table to improve performance. GW-BASIC did not recognize it, for example. Wasn’t going to make Wordstar any faster. And it was an expensive add-on.

Numeric coprocessors we’re always pretty niche until they came bundled with the 486 and 68040, even then the 486SX and 68LC040 continued to sell, and did not have bundled FPUs.

A lot of software back then tended to stick to integer operations for everything as much as possible, at least where performance mattered.

Almost no DOS or Win3 programs were able to use a 8087 FPU anyway. Only very specific stuff like autocad. Perhaps lotus 123.

There is a slot for an optional one, but as others have pointed out - software for the 8088 which used FP were few and far between.

An ISA slot? Sweet! I miss the simplicity and directness it offered compared to PCI.

Reminds me of my Toshiba Libretto

This would be a great upgrade from my Kaypro 2000!

It has a "Windows" key on the keyboard?

It look like, from the picture, but I don't know why it has because it would not be meaningful on that kind of computer even if you do have Windows 3.0, I think.

No turbo button?

It's an 8088, not a 80286! This one isn't even 16 bit.

8088 were 16-bit CPUs, it’s just Intel had its memory bus limited to 8 lines.

There were 8088 variants rated for 8+ MHz, motherboards supporting them had independent oscillators for the CPU and the ISA bus and you could switch speeds with software or a keyboard shortcut. Maybe also a button?

I owned one. The combo was Ctrl-Alt-Minus.

There were a lot of DOS games that were designed to run at exactly 4.77Mhz. The gameplay and music would run at 2x if you enabled turbo mode.

640k is all you’ll ever need.

That would be interesting but MS-DOS? Absolutely not.

I'm having much more fun tinkering in Linux on a 150 EUR Chinese laptop with a fairly anemic CPU.

If there's an itch for retro computing I'll just use an emulator.

The only thing I'd probably enjoy using old tech for would be stochastic super-optimization of programs i.e. to find the very best combination of machine code that executes a certain algorithm maximally fast or with minimum memory.

It might run ELKS https://github.com/jbruchon/elks

Oh, nice. Bookmarking it.

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