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jmclnx

OpenBSD may be looking at the same:

https://www.openbsd.org/i386.html

Luckily NetBSD still exists, I very much doubt they will depreciate 32 bit:

https://www.netbsd.org/ports/i386/hardware.html

NetBSD to me is a cool system, doing some unique things. But, sadly they need more support than they get these days.

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This is probably a good sign for anyone out there interested into getting into a long tail niche industry, similar to how COBOL lives on in banking. There are probably going to be places we'd never expect running 32-bit applications for decades to come (I'm thinking industrial automation shops and the like), and getting in on the ground floor of developing for NetBSD would be a high-powered signal that you are interested in helping support these ancient machines.

(Do I recommend this myself? Well, I think techies find all kinds of weird things fun. :))

> OpenBSD may be looking at the same

Is that in reference to this line?

> Due to the increased usage of OpenBSD/amd64, as well as the age and practicality of most i386 hardware, only easy and critical security fixes are backported to i386. The project has more important things to focus on.

This has been on the i386 page for quite a while. I haven't specifically heard of the developers dropping i386, but I also don't follow the mailing lists as much as I used to.

I really hope OpenBSD doesn't drop i386 as it's my go-to operating system for a lot of otherwise not very useful hardware - retro PCs, 32-bit laptops, etc. One can take any bog standard Pentium or higher box and turn it into a usable machine with OpenBSD.

Yeah, I'm still running openbsd on a dual pentium pro 200 with 96 mb ram as my irssi machine :)

It's almost a miracle that the quantum fireball in it still lives, it's over 20 years old now.

Very impressive setup! If the Fireball ever dies, an SSD or CF card will probably keep the rest of the box going for another 20 years. :)

Why would you bother with the second CPU just for irssi? You would probably notice the energy savings from removing it

I usually ssh into it, so sshd runs on one and irssi on the other. Also, the whole computer is just got fun.

The motherboard also has a UW SCSI interface, but I have no disks left sadly. The 10k rpm Seagate died a long time ago.

My understanding is that, they will support the architecture as long as one of the OpenBSD developers doesn't mind maintaining it. It isn't like Linux. Linux developers will make a top-down decision. OpenBSD is more of a, if a developer has the physical hardware and will to do it, it will remain supported until that is no longer true. Same with NetBSD, but I think NetBSD is a little more loose with the 'having physical hardware.' The spirit of OpenBSD is, no, you need to build on physical hardware. NetBSD doesn't mine the primary mechanism of testing and development being a QEMU image.

Which hopefully gives some comfort. There isn't a shortage of cheap 32-bit x86 machines. The biggest problem are probably like sparc machines that getting your hands on one in good condition can still be pricey. But you can find a functional 32-bit x86 desktop machine on ebay for 30 bucks.

> Luckily NetBSD still exists, I very much doubt they will depreciate 32 bit:

I love NetBSD and their focus ppears to be so you can run a modern supported/bugfixed OS on legacy hardware.

So FreeBSD and NetBSD are perfect compliments to each other.

Didn't OpenBSD keep platforms like VAX going for some time? Googling, they discontinued it in 2016, which is pretty late for that.

Yes NetBSD has nice chill vibe to it, neither Free nor Open has. But packages are less fresh, and lots of things are not supported.

I guess it could eventually move to Tier II and join the 68k Amigas which is still on NetBSD 9.3 [0]

[0] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/

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