General > General Technical Chat

nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?

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DiTBho:
Yup, for me it means 1992-1997  :D

I am working on a special form of DosBOX that is able to embed a { .exe, .com } dos executable like if was a true Linux program. But it's not like Wine, no doubt it's simpler, but it also captures all the function calls to display something and readdress the text to the console.

The CONIO support is partially working, and buggy, this stuff has been designed to embed DOS compilers, it doesn't work with anything with a GUI.

Anyway, it just works, and I don't need anything else from my DOS-era.

rstofer:
Remember, the first PC incantation of Unix was 386BSD and many flavors of PC Unix started with this version.  Note the '386'...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD

In the days of the command line where no GUI was available, the 386 was adequate.  I would go for the 100 MHz 486 but that's just an incremental change.  Command line rules!

A 386 was adequate for UCSD Pascal and certainly for MS-DOS.  These machines were quite fast because there was little overhead.

I have a 50 MHz eZ80 board running CP/M 2.0.  It rips!

It's just that our expectations have changed over the last 30 years.  I started programming on punch cards.  I'm not sure whether I miss it or not!

SiliconWizard:
Designing "vintage" stuff is a hobby as any other. Why would it make no sense to design a 386-based board when many still design 6502-based ones @1 MHz? A 386 is much, much more powerful while still being relatively "easy" to integrate, I guess that's the whole point. Try designing your own small CPU board with even a Pentium, and tell us how far you go.

It can be out of nostalgia, but also for the learning factor. You'll learn a whole lot designing and programming your own system like this. That's something that has become basically impossible with more modern tech - with which you'll be basically stuck with using something off-the-shelf, or emulating something on a purely virtual basis. So even for a young EE that would never have even used a 386-based PC, designing such a board would be a good exercise.

If you want to get your hands dirty, this kind of CPUs still make sense.
Alternatively, you can still see some people designing 68030-based boards. For those who like the 68k better. Manageable as a single-person design, yet can run a whole range of existing software.

rstofer:
Some of us are still messing around with Z80 (and CP/M) systems:

https://rc2014.co.uk/

Don't forget, CP/M had a PL/I compiler.  It works well on my 50 MHz eZ80.  Microsoft had a nice implementation of Fortran (and assembly) along with a nice linker.

There was also a more powerful shell, MicroShell, that added many Unix like features.

The easiest chip to use was the 8085.  I did several projects with that chip.  Palo Alto Tiny Basic was usually used for hardware debugging.  If Basic ran, the system was useful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC

Not only did my generation have the best bands, we had the best toys!

SiliconWizard:
I have the CP/M source code, and it was a mix of assembly and PL/M.

Just a small utility routine:

--- Code: ---move: procedure(s,d,n);
    declare (s,d) address, n byte;
    declare a based s byte, b based d byte;
        do while (n := n - 1) <> 255;
        b = a; s = s + 1; d = d + 1;
        end;
    end move;
--- End code ---

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