[Coco] DriveWire

[Joel Ewy]

Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Monday 13 April 2009, wdg3rd at comcast.net wrote:
>   
>> ----- "Bruce W. Calkins" <brucewcalkins at charter.net> wrote:
>>     
>>> From: "Bruce W. Calkins" <brucewcalkins at charter.net>
>>> To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
>>> Sent: Sunday, April 12, 2009 11:14:32 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
>>> Subject: Re: [Coco] DriveWire
>>>
>>>       
>>>> Just show me an example of somebody
>>>> (not a Microsoft employee or contractor)
>>>> installing a supported Microsoft OS on
>>>> bare metal in this millennium.
>>>>         
>>> Been there, done that.  98SE & XP Pro 64 bit.
>>>
>>>       
>>>> I can do it with any of a dozen
>>>> Linux distros.
>>>>         
>>> In most cases LINUX is easier, but I have one unit that runs a "test"
>>> of XP
>>> Pro quite well, but chokes on LINUX.
>>>       
>> Tell me the MOBO models.  I can't think of one that will "test" XP and won't
>> run Linux.  Does it "run" XP?  And while 98SE isn't quite "this
>> millennium", I'd like some details as to what kind of bare metal you
>> inflicted that onto.  As in a decade and a half, I haven't found a system
>> (386 & up) that wouldn't boot Linux if it booted Windows 3.11 or later.
>>     
>
> IIRC linux won't run on a 386-SX, or at least I couldn't get it to fly many 
> years ago.  W-95 ran on it ok.  Glacial speeds though...
>
>   
Current kernels won't, but it certainly did in the past.  My first Linux 
installation was a '386-SX/40 with 16M of RAM and a couple 40M MFM 
drives (Well, one of them only formatted to about 32M after I opened the 
case and dug out a broken-off R/W head [I know, don't EVER do this -- it 
was ruined anyway, and worked fine for me until I replaced them with a 
100M IDE drive.  Just used it for swap, anyway...]).  It was SLS (Soft 
Landing Systems, which I believe was a proto-Slackware...) downloaded 
from Delphi at 14.4 in the form of 10 1.44M floppy images.  Must have 
been somewhere around 1993 or 1994, I guess.  Still have the disks.

So yes, it did at one time run on a '386-SX.  The main problem with 
those systems at the time was the 16MB RAM limitation, though it seemed 
like a pretty fair amount of memory back then.  It even ran X, though 
there weren't many interesting X applications to use at that point.  The 
hard drives were probably the real bottleneck on that system.

JCE