I recall a mechanic saying that some car diagnostic tools they still used required a DOS PC with an ISA slot.
Sometimes you really are stuck, frozen in time, as the manufacturer of the equipment went out of business ages ago and all new equipment, tools and software would cost more than the company can afford.
Then there's the second hand market to also consider. That can also keep old and currently unsupported equipment in use.
AliExpress wouldn't let me view the item without registration so I actually found the thing on Taobao from one of the sellers, the price is ~$100, looks like it has sold 37 units in the past month
Also this kind of thing is dominated by manufacturing costs/etc (which are not inconsiderable for small runs or cottage manufacture) rather than pure parts cost.
Like yeah it’s $3 for the cpu, and $20 of support chips, and $100 of custom small-run assembly, etc (made up numbers but you get the idea)
The flimsy looking plastic shell made it look more like a toy to me, and I guess it was meant to be, the person made those as toys for people to mess around
> The "Book 8088" laptop PC combines modern components with an Intel 8088 processor and 640KB (yes, that's kilobytes) of memory
Ought to be enough for anyone.
You mean that quote that [he](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quote-won-t-go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html) [never](https://www.wired.com/1997/01/did-gates-really-say-640k-is-enough-for-anyone/) said? I thought you were meant to be a journalist.
We must be seeing through rose-tinted glasses here.
In the days of 8088, you had to read manuals about how to set certain jumpers on the motherboard to do really basic stuff, like add a hard drive.
Not only did USB not exist yet, plug-and-play did not exist either. Doing something like trying to add audio to a computer was an engineering nightmare involving setting hardware IRQs in the BIOS.
The CPUs at the time could not perform floating point operations. THis is impossible to believe today but was totally true. They would literally use software to "emulate" floating point.
The Instruction Set of 8088 CPUs was horrendous. By 2002, Pentium III CPUs would read in CISC instructions from RAM, and convert them on-the-fly into micro-codes performed by a RISC core. It was so bad that the CPUs being built had to convert instructions to a different format while they were running.
My advice to anyone who likes to tinker : just get a rasbperry PI or Arduino board.
If you use software to emulate floating point, isn't it basically just defaulting the 1 to be 10,000 or something and display only the first digit if the rest are 0s?
Actually, how many digits can these devices even process?
> The Instruction Set of 8088 CPUs was horrendous. By 2002, Pentium III CPUs would read in CISC instructions from RAM, and convert them on-the-fly into micro-codes performed by a RISC core. It was so bad that the CPUs being built had to convert instructions to a different format while they were running.
eh, decoding is still a thing even with modern ARM processors
They micro-code yes, but only for speed reasons. (they actually cache decoded instructions. Modern CPUs are monsters). The PentiumIII was micro-coding because the ISA sucked.
> The PentiumIII was micro-coding because the ISA sucked
P6 did it for speed reasons, too. And modern ARM is pretty messy too after all the cruft it gained over the years.
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> In the days of 8088, you had to read manuals about how to set certain jumpers on the motherboard to do really basic stuff, like add a hard drive.
That was still there in 386 days.
Yeah but like...that all still sounds wonderful to me. Sure, it's pretty dang cool to have magic phones in our pockets that can do everything, but, as illogical as it is, I really do miss those days. Something about having to work with and fully understand a machine in order to use it was deeply satisfying.
> The CPUs at the time could not perform floating point operations. THis is impossible to believe today but was totally true. They would literally use software to "emulate" floating point.
I recall there was a game from the early 1990s where it used integer calculations to approximate floating point results for the game's physics.
The original PlayStation didn't have a FPU either. However, it was one of the first consumer products with a SIMD unit, though. That's also why the graphics on the PSX were so wobbly.
No, the reason for the wobbliness was the lack of sub-pixel rendering in its rasterizer. You can do smooth 3d rendering just fine without floating point.
I remember back in the day not having a math coprocessor...it was brutal when the family got an inkjet printer. Turned out that was important for some reason and after clicking print it took an hour for a color print to come out.
>In the days of 8088, you had to read manuals about how to set certain jumpers on the motherboard to do really basic stuff, like add a hard drive.
Oh listen to Mr. Fancy Pants here with his high-end motherboard with an onboard hard drive controller! No need to waste an ISA slot for you!
My friend found it a couple days ago and I found out about it via their Mastodon post. Ordered one immediately, shipped soon after ordering. I am really looking forward to that one. The CGA screen is a weird choice, but 8088 is not fast enough to drive a VGA anyways, and it seems that CGA runs on a real chip hardware so probably no MCGA support.
The same seller was also offering something called Hand386, which is PocketCHIP form factor real hardware 386+VGA+8MB+OPL3, but that form factor is absolutely unusable to I skipped it (hope they will make a laptop format 386/486 soon). The 386 one seems to have cpu/soc salvaged from embedded systems (a lot of copiers, for example, ran on a 486).
When you get one see if you can run Paku Paku on it
Paku Paku is a Pacman clone made to run on an 8088 with 128KB of RAM and it uses text based graphics to represent pixels so it can get more colors than what would traditionally be available through CGA graphics
https://deathshadow.com/pakuPaku
Weird custom pci cards using pcie bridges for reading raw RF information?
Solid low noise amplifiers?
Less than a tenth of the price of something branded over here so I can mod them without worrying about damaging something?
I'll take five.
Heh. Perfect timing with the threads about Intel wanting to ditch legacy 16-bit and 32-bit modes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/13mhe6s/intel_is_seeking_feedback_for_x86s_a_64bitonly/
https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/13mdl2b/envisioning_a_simplified_intel_architecture_for/
The biggest market I see for that laptop (if it's actually legit) are the owners of legacy medical and industrial systems. Where you have +$300K equipment that requires a 1980's computer.
I became interested and I decided to go to Ali
Seems this post has boosted their popularity, [these all sold out](https://shares.su/l/Book8088DOSSystemNotebookIBMPCXTCompatibleMachine) :\\
> Or another industrial system where the "latest" software for it specifically required Windows 7 (won't work with W7 virtual machine running on W10) with the vendor stating that they were still working on W10 support as of 2022. They ignored my email asking if they were aware of W10's EOL on 2025 and if they would be supporting W11.
I keep wondering what kinds of dev choices are made to end up in these clusterfucks.
Fair enough if your robot arm was made in 1985 and the system thus only runs under DOS, because it used real mode, and thus couldn't work on Windows, not even 95. Fair enough if it was made in 96 and thus only worked on DOS based Windows.
But how are you making control software post-2010 that only supports one specific version of Windows, and doesn't even want to run under a VM? What kinds of bonkers OS calls are you making to cause that to happen? And even if you now are in that pickle, why are you then developing the next version of your software in the exact same way, so you don't even know whether or not it'll work on the next version of Windows which is already out by the time your new version is out?
Like, I get that whoever's developing this is probably not paid enough to bother to do much, but christ. Windows intercompatibility is like one of the big reasons it's still around as much as it is. Fair enough that it happens every once in a while, but it feels like it's a consistent thing when it comes to industrial stuff.
In my old workplace's case it was a third party library that we had made us stuck. We had something resembling of source code but no one knew how to build it, which part does what etc. Not a single documentation. So every other engineer that came after the old one left decided to stick with the old "we do not support newest version of X" because no one knew how to move the behemoth of a project to new tooling while keeping the 3rd party library working.
Their software also supported Windows XP and older, so I'm assuming they are drowning in +20 years of technical debt with no one knowing how the codes work anymore, and they had been hiring minimum wage programmers to apply band-aids for a long time.
> Management was surprised when their ancient single point of failure (with no backup) brought down an entire production line.
Let me guess: Former requests for funding to set up some sort of backup solution were denied because it was deemed unnecessary?
Several years before I showed up there, a group of engineers proposed a project to reverse engineer the ancient machine because some of the documentation was missing. Just in case if they ever needed to rush order a modern replacement.
It was denied. I wouldn't be surprised if the person who saw no need for the project had been promoted 1-2 times and moved onto another company by the laws of physics and probability scheduled a surprise "maintenance event" for the place.
> Management was surprised when their ancient single point of failure (with no backup) brought down an entire production line.
They couldn't have actually been surprised at this right? How are you in manufacturing without understanding the basics if manufacturing?
The engineers understood the risk. We all knew no one really knew how that machine worked anymore, and many of the documentation was missing.
Management didn't care. "Why replace something that is working fine?", until the fire happened.
It's the same reason why the sysadmin and justrolledintotheshop constantly have discussions about things that were run into the ground. Not much difference between neglected RAIDs that no one replaced the failed redundant drives until a non-redundant drive failed with no backups, [and engines that didn't have their oil replaced for 135K kilometers.](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/51l80h/audi_tt_after_135000_kilometers_without_an_oil/)
Oh boy you'd be amazed at how common sense often vanishes even in STEM fields. A factory I know cut down on wages by encouraging senior engineers to retire. Well, afterwards they no longer had anyone who fully knew how to operate the older machines. Bravo. They also moved to more strictly taylorist management styles which is famously terrible for morale on the long term while boosting very short term results (it's also dehumanizing and obsolete as fuck) which led to even more of the most qualified staff to go work in places that didn't treat them like 19th century coal miners
In the industrial (and by extension I presume also medical) sector it can happen that equipment gets certified for one, extremely specific, configuration. It's not unheard of that a machine gets set up without ever going online afterwards. In these instances I can understand why you wouldn't make an effort as it needs to be 110% rock solid in its current state and another OS version would technically be running the machine out of certified spec. It's terrible for maintenance as you'll have to find native hardware for repairs but you also maintain total predictability for any issues.
Sound blaster sound effects? I'm struggling to think of any.
Ad-lib music though? Plenty. So I'd imagine only really the OPL2 half of that cart is gonna see any use.
Serial is certainly a mess when you get into weird/old hardware.
I have to keep two Usb adapters around: a cheap(probably counterfeit) TTL only adapter, and a 'good' optoisolated and level shifting one.
But guess which one works more often? The cheap one -- unless it needs 2 stop bits, then it chokes. Maybe it's more accepting of bad timing? Don't know.
no no, I'm sorry not McLaren Formula 1 teams. I meant THE [McLaren F1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/1996_McLaren_F1_Chassis_No_63_6.1_Front.jpg). That thing needed an ancient IBM laptop to service it and interface with its onboard computer. I don't know if they ever made a workaround for it though.
The hobby drama here is that it appears they used the BIOS from the Xi8088/Micro8088 processor, and filed off the license and attribution lines.
The original dev is none-to-pleased, and it's sort of silly, given that said BIOS is open source.
There are several different 8088-based kit projects, of decent quality, in a similar price class, although none is a laptop.
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