The two main problems I ran into were 1) software support at the application layer, and 2) video driver support. There is a herculean effort on the part of package maintainers to build software for distros, and no one has been building 32 bit version of software for years, even if it is possible to build from source. There is only a very limited set of software you can use, even CLI software because so many things are built with 64 bit dependencies. Secondly, old video card drivers are being dropped from the kernel. This means all you have is basic VGA "safe-mode" level support, which isn't even fast enough to play an MPEG2. My final try was to install Debian 5, which was period correct and had support for my hardware, but the live CDs of the the time were not hybrid so the ISO could not boot from USB. I didn't have a burner so I finally gave up.
So I think these types of projects are fun for a proof of concept, but unfortunately are never going to give life to old computers.
It baffles me how usable Office 97 still. I was playing with it recently in a VM to see if it worked as well as I remembered, and it was amazing how packed with features it is considering it's nearing on thirty. There's no accounting for taste but I prefer the old Office UI to the ribbon, there's a boatload of formatting options for Word, there's 3D Word Art that hits me right in the nostalgia, Excel 97 is still very powerful and supports pretty much every feature I use regularly. It's obviously snappy on modern hardware, but I think it was snappy even in 1998.
I'm sure people can enumerate here on the newer features that have come in later editions, and I certainly do not want to diminish your experience if you find all the new stuff useful, but I was just remarkably impressed how much cool stuff was in packed into the software.
Alternatively you may have accidently built a great machine for installing FreeDOS to run old DOS games/applications. It does install from USB, but needs BIOS so can't run it on modern PC hardware.
It's really astonishing how full-featured it all was, and it was running on those Pentium machines that had a "turbo" button to switch between 33 and 66 MHz and just a few MBs of RAM.
(edit to say I'm obviously ignoring i8n etc.)
That seems odd? Debian 12 Bullseye (oldstable) has fully supported i386 port. I would expect it to run reasonably well on late 32 bit era systems (Pentium4/AthlonXP)
With memory prices skyrocketing, I wonder if we will see a freeze in computer hardware requirements for software. Maybe it's time to optimize again.
Don't lose hope. You can boot it one way or other :)
Nope, that’s a modern problem. That’s what happens when the js-inmates run the asylum. We get shitty bloated software and 8300 copies of a browser running garage applications written by garbage developers.
I can’t wait to see what LLMs do with that being the bulk of their training.
Exciting!
Yeah you can get machines which are higher specced easily enough, but they’re usually at the upper end of the average consumers budget.
My first thought: How about using a current computer to run qemu then mounting the Lenny iso as an image and installing to a qemu hard drive? Then dd the hard drive image to your 32bit target. (That might need access to a hard drive caddy depending on how you can boot the 32bit target machine, so a 'hardware regress' I suppose).
My second thought: If target machine is bootable from a more recent live linux, try a debootstrap install of a minimal Lenny with networking (assuming you can connect target machine to a network, I'm guessing with a cable rather than wifi). Reboot and install more software as required.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a23139/c...
But otherwise, yes, Debian 12 should work fine as you say. Not so long ago I installed it on an old Pentium M laptop I had lying around. Did take some tweaking, turned out that the wifi card didn't support WPA2/3 mixed mode which I had configured on my AP, so I had to downgrade security for the experiment. But video was hopeless, it couldn't even play 144p videos on youtube without stuttering. Maybe the video card (some Intel thing, used the i915 driver) didn't have HW decoding for whatever video encoder youtube uses nowadays (AV1?), or whatever.
Rookie developers who use hundreds of node modules or huge CSS frameworks are ruining performance and hurt the environment with bloated software that consumes energy and life time.
The point being made was that for many people whose lives doesn't circle around computers, their computing needs have not changed since the early 1990's, other than doing stuff on Internet nowadays.
For those people, using digital typewriter hardly requires more features than Final Writer, and for what they do with numbers in tables and a couple of automatic updated cells, something like Superplan would also be enough.
Truly, I do not miss the swamp of toolbar icons without any labels. I don't weep for the old interface.
Just please don't gaslight us with some alternate Amiga bullshit history. All that shit was super slow, you were begging for +5Mhz or +25KB of cache. If Amiga had any success outside of teenage gamers, that stuff would have all been historical, just like it was on the Mac.
I am now starting to wonder how much of it has to do with network access to Sharepoint and telemetry data that most likely didn't exist in the Office 97 dial-up era.
Features-wise - I doubt there is a single feature I use (deliberately) today in Excel or Word that wasn't available in Office 97.
I'd happily suffer Clippy over Co-Pilot.
My biggest obstacles are that it doesn't have an ethernet port and that it doesn't have BIOS USB support (although it does have a card with two USB ports).
I've managed to run some small Linux distros on it (I'll definitely try this one), but, you're right, I haven't really found anything useful to run on it.
The CPU will be struggling with most modern video formats including h.264.
I expect at least the base system (including X) to work without big issues (if your hardware is supported), for extra packages you may need a bit of luck.
[1] https://www.openbsd.org/plat.html
Meanwhile my home PC starts blowing whenever I fire up a video game.
It definitely was snappy. I used it on school computers that were Pentium (1?) with about as much RAM as my current L2 cache (16MB). Dirty rectangles and win32 primitives. Very responsive. It also came with VB6 where you could write your own interpreted code very easily to do all kinds of stuff.
It can boot from a floppy or from a CD drive, and it lets you chainload into a live usb even on old computers.
I used it to boot from CD from a floppy in an old Pentium MMX and it worked great (although slow, of course)
If you were from Humanities and worked for a newspaper design layout you would use a Mac at work. That's it.
#inicio de fichero
--format=bestvideo[height<=?480][fps<=?30]+bestaudio/best
#fin de fichero
#inicio
ytdl-format=bestvideo[height<=?480][fps<=?30]+bestaudio/best
ao=sndio
vo=gpu,xv
audio-pitch-correction=no
quiet=yes
pause=no
profile=fast
vd-lavc-skiploopfilter=all
#demuxer-cache-wait=yes
#demuxer-max-bytes=4MiB
#fin
Upgrade ASAP.
With the small caveat that I only use Word, it runs perfectly in WINE and has done for over a decade. I use it on 64-bit Ubuntu, and it runs very well: it's also possible to install the 3 service releases that MS put out, and the app runs very quickly even on hardware that is 15+ years old.
The service packs are a good idea. They improve stability, and make export to legacy formats work.
WINE works better than a VM: it takes less memory, there's no VM startup/shutdown time, and host integration is better: e.g. host filesystem access and bidirectional cut and paste.
It's an optional install. You can just click Custom, untick "Office Assistant" and other horrid bits of bloat like "Find Fast" and "Word Mail in Outlook" and get rid of that stuff.
That is absolutely not a valid generalisation.
I worked on Macs from the start of my career in 1988. They were the standard computer for state schools in education here in the Isle of Man in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The Isle of Man's national travel company ran on a Mac database, Omnis, and later moved to Windows to keep using Omnis.
It's still around:
I supported dozens of Mac-using clients in London through the 1990s and they were the standard platform in some businesses. Windows NT Server had good MacOS support from the very first version, 3.1, and Macs could access Windows NT Server shares over the built-in Appleshare client, and store Mac files complete with their Resource Forks on NTFS volumes. From 1993 onwards this made mixed Mac/PC networks much easier.
I did subcontracted Mac support for a couple of friends of mine's consultancy businesses because they were Windows guys and didn't "speak Mac".
Yes, they were very strong in print, graphics, design, photography, etc. but not only in those markets. Richer types used them as home computers. I also worked on Macs in the music and dance businesses and other places.
Macs were always there.
Maybe you didn't notice but they always were. Knowing PC/Mac integration was a key career skill for me, and the rise of OS X made the classic MacOS knowledge segue into more general Unix/Windows integration work.
Some power users defected to Windows NT between 1993 and 2001 but then it reversed and grew much faster: from around 2001, PowerMacs started to become a credible desktop workstation for power users because of OS X. From 2006, Macintel boxes became more viable in general business use because the Intel chips meant you could run Windows in a VM at full speed for one or two essential Windows apps. They ran IE natively and WINE started to make OS X feasible for some apps with no need for a Windows licence.
In other words, the rise of OS X coincided with the rise of Linux as a viable server and GUI workstation.
And they did video editing on Amigas with an add-on peripheral called a Video Toaster.
Video compression is a lot more computationally complex now than it was in the 90s, and it is unlikely that an Amiga with a 68k or old PowerPC would be able to handle 4k video with H265 or ProRes. Even if you had specialized hardware to decode it, I’m not 100% sure that an Amiga has enough memory to hold a single decompressed frame to edit against.
Don’t get me wrong, Video Toaster is super awesome, but I don’t think it’s up to modern tasks.
A fella can dream, anyways.
Little known fact; before 2006 all we did was play Pong and make beep-boop noises on our computers.
This statement must be Linux-only
Pre-compiled packages for i386 are still available for all versions of NetBSD including the current one
I still compile software for i386 from pkgsrc
https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/
NB. I'm not interested in graphical software, I prefer VGA textmode
But perhaps I'm just projecting. Ugh, Electron.
So in other words, their computer needs have changed significantly.
You can't do most modern web-related stuff on a machine from the 90s. Assuming you could get a modern browser (with a modern TLS stack, which is mandatory today) compiled on a machine from the 90s, it would be unusably slow.
If they want to travel they go to an agency, they still go to the local bank branch to do their stuff, news only what comes up on radio and TV, music is what is on radio, CDs and vinyl, and yet manage to have a good life.
Wanted to get a Mac, needed to travel there, or order by catalogue, from magazine ads.
On my university there were about 5 LCs on a single room for students use, while the whole campus was full of PCs, and UNIX green/amber phosphor terminals to DG/UX rooms, on all major buildings.
Besides that single room, there were two more on the IT department, and that was about it.
When Apple was going down, between buying Be or NeXT as last survival decision, the fate of the university keeping those Macs around was being discussed.
Nowadays on an n270 CPU based netbook I use mpv and yt-dlp capped to 420p, even if I can play 720p@30FPS.
So, A/V production, something I said too. My point still stands. Macs in Europe were seen as something fancy for media production people and that's it. Something niche for the arts/press/TV/cinema world.
Like I said, and you missed: but not only there.
People often mistake "Product A dominates in market B" -- meaning A outsells all others in B -- for "A only sells in market B."
Macs were expensive. Clone PCs were cheap. Yeah, cheap products outsell expensive ones. Doesn't mean that the expensive ones are some kind of fancy designer brand only used by the idle rich.
Step by step:
1. Install WINE, all defaults from OS package manager.
2. Open terminal. Change to directory with Office 97 install files.
3. Run `wine setup`
4. For me: turn off everything except the essential bits of Word. Do not install OS extensions, as they won't work. No bits that plug into other apps. No WordMail, no FastFind, no Quicklaunch toolbar, no Office Assistant.
5. Enter product key: 11111-1111111
6. Allow to complete.
7. Install SRs.
8. Run and use app.
No one got Macs at school either. First DOS, then Windows 95/98. Maybe in some Universities they used Macbooks well into the OSX era, as a reliable Unix machine to compile legacy scientific stuff; and even in those environments GNU/Linux began to work perfectly well recompiling everything from Sparcs and the like with a much cheaper price.
Forget about pre-OSX machines in Spain outside of a newspaper/publishing/AV producing office. Also, by the time XP and 2000 were realiable enough against OSX (w9x was hell) that OS was replaced for much cheaper PC alternatives.
I mean, if w2k/wxp could handle big loads without BSODing every few hours, that was a success. And as the Pentium 4's with SSE2 and Core Duo's happened, suddenly G4's and G'5 weren't that powerful any more.
You can do modern TLS stuff with a machine from the 90's if you cut own the damn JavaScript and run services from https://farside.link or gemini://gemi.dev proxying the web to Gemini.
My favorite was that Paste was a giant button while Cut and Copy were small because the UX research found that people paste more than they cut or copy...
Whereas I lived (and am back, sadly) in an offshore tax haven.
The rich used Macs. Musicians used Macs. They were not some dedicated tool only found in certain places. Entire industries, big important industries, ran on them.
What killed Commodore and Atari was that in the end although they had niches, they didn't conquer whole sectors.
This is why Sinclair Research tried to push into the business market with the QL. Sir Clive knew that the home/games sector was about thin margins and price battles, while in rich America, you could get fat on it, you can't in Europe.
He carved out an early niche as the cheapest home computers that were good enough and were competitive, but it was low-margin/high-unit-count.
The business market will pay for good tools. Bits of it paid extra for Macs for decades because they were good at some things.
That is a viable long-term market: "the best cheap home computer for the money" is not.
[1] My first broadband connection was in 1998 at 768/768 kbit symmetrical. My first megabit speed connection was in 2006 or 2007. in 2010 or 2011 we got VDSL and it was 16 whole megabits. Now i have 300mbit on a good day, and 150mbit on a bad day.
I literally wrote the guide on how to use old hardware with VM tech to route your house, first with ipcop[2], then generically[3], and just this week i wrote a guide on how to get ipv6 working with starlink and dd-wrt[4].
i've been in this a long time.
[2]https://web.archive.org/web/20220323223325/https://www.dslre...
[3]https://web.archive.org/web/20131214075417/https://www.dslre...
and the dd-wrt starlink one from this week:
[4]https://nextcloud.projectftm.com/index.php/s/4iScqZbrfYiNcKy
ETA: it is hilarious how much pushback i got about doing all of this in a VM, just scant years before "you should just use a VM for that" became the default answer, and a decade before "just put it in a k8s cluster and pay someone a quarter million a year to babysit it" became a thing...
also ipcop booted and installed off a single floppy forever
Still remember it was possible to perfectly mimick existing documents that had long stopped being printed with such a quality in replication.
The introduction of ribbons was a cruel mistake. It gets harder and harder to know where anything is located nowadays because ribbons hide options too often.
I have P1 90mhz P2 500mhz and typing from P4 just now :P
I think biggest limit will be missing SSE2 PAE POPCNT modern distros need this
Start with a conventional MBR and active FAT32 partition, and make sure it will boot to MS-DOS, this only requires the 3 DOS OS files to be present when the bootsector is a DOS bootsector (which seeks IO.SYS).
Once that's done, then (optionally) copy the DOS bootsector to a file on that FAT32 volume, name the (512 byte) file BOOTSECT.DOS. A disk editor can do this, or carefully use dd in Linux.
I then boot to Windows and use its CLI to run SYSLINUX.EXE (v6.03 on virgin media), to "Syslinux" (verb) the FAT32 volume. You can alternatively do this from Linux. This replaces the DOS bootsector with a Syslinux bootsector that will seek a Syslinux folder instead of seeking IO.SYS. Also writes ldlinux.sys and ldlinux.c32 to the FAT volume.
You do have to be consistent with your Syslinux version, the .C32 files in use must be from the same version of Syslinux that you use to "Syslinux" the FAT volume. And must match the version of Isolinux used to make the ISO. To find out which version of Isolinux was originally used on the ISO, open the ISO in a disk editor and these have big sectors but about the third sector down will be some readable text with the Isolinux version number.
Then copy all the files & folders from the mounted ISO to the FAT volume, change the name of the isolinux folder to syslinux, in the syslinux folder change the name of isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg.
A properly prepared distro distributed in ISO form should then boot normally the way it is intended when stored on a FAT filesystem instead.
Show-stoppers can still arise when some live distros have .CFG bootstrings within their Isolinux folder that specify CDROM or other hardcoded deficiencies, for USB you can sometimes specify REMOVABLE after you change the foldername to Syslinux. You can also specify a chosen volume in case it's not picked up by default.
You may need to look at every .CFG file in the Syslinux folder, they are all usually linked, ideally there is only syslinux.cfg but some people make it more complicated than that. Back them up before editing but they are just text files.