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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if it should be considered cheating to use an emulator because they have a very different CPU instruction timing profile than real hardware; here's a notable result from before, with real hardware running XP down at 8MHz:

http://winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm

Also, it looks like he started with something resembling WinPE, which is already stripped-down compared to a regular install.

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Interestingly, the Pentium Overdrive mentioned in your linked article will actually run relatively recent OSes - the latest release of Slackware, for instance, should still run on it.

I have the 83MHz version in my old 486 (though it's really not a 486 anymore - ha ha), and got Slackware booting on it out of sheer curiosity a few years ago. What surprised me is that, modern software aside, 14.x wasn't much slower than a period-accurate Linux - Slackware 14 (2010s) and Mandrake 7 (1999) booted at more or less the same speed.

That's a really interesting observation, I sort of noticed C++ being slow to compile doesn't necessarily improve a whole lot even on newer hardware, so I wonder if there's a different OS that runs on 90s and 2010's hardware that could run better on more modern hardware.

Pentium Overdrive is basically a 586 in a 486 package... which also means, with an adapter, it could fit into a 386 mobo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29046117

Also from that site: Windows 98 on a 386!

(1) https://www.winhistory.de/more/386/386vers.htm

That reminds me of when I had my first computer as a teenager, an old 386. My buddy said it would be impossible to install Windows 95 on it, so I promptly proved him wrong! Great memory, it's good to know that I could've gone further

I was disappointed when I read that the CPU was virtual, I thought this will be about real hardware. Still, I appreciate the notes about stripping down the OS.

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