$200-ish laptop with a 386 and 8MB of RAM is a modern take on Windows 3.1 era

arstechnica.com

22 points·Brajeshwar··12 comments

Linux without a DE would make more sense to me than win3.1.

An early 90's Linux distro (SLS, Slackware) would run pretty well on these. My first Linux box was a 386SX with only 3 megs of RAM.

Neat!

I wonder if demand for DOS computers for industrial control applications was the driving force behind creating these. I’m sure just buying a new DOS machine with parallel and serial ports might be more straightforward than spinning up a VM on modern hardware in some settings.

I had the handheld version of this and it was neat, but yeah.. definitely better running Win 3.1..

Glad to see the different VGA options too, because the CHIPS one was sort of janky IIRC

> There's no built-in trackpad, though the arrow keys can be used to simulate a mouse.

> The system also includes a USB port, though as with the Book 8088, it may be usable for mass storage but not for typical USB accessories.

I bet you could run something like NeXTSTEP on one of these quite nicely.

I think a 486 is the minimum; it was pretty snappy on the 486DX2/66 I had.

Yeah, but given this is a fake 386 I do wonder.

What do you mean by fake?

TFA says it's a 386 processor [1]. It's just not a model from the 80s/90s. I wouldn't call that fake.

[1]: https://www.cpushack.com/ULi.html

it appears to be a real 80386SX embedded in the SoC, which also bundles the bridges, so i would not expect the math coprocessor from the 486, nor the amount of cache (this is an SX after all).

see https://www.cpushack.com/ULi.html for more information on this (not new) SoC.

Yeah, SX is going to be rough.

What do you mean, "fake"? They claim it's a 40 MHz Ali M6117, 386 SX compatible.

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