alt Hacker News> it's quite a feat to fit this into 4 MB on a 386.
I had 2 different Librex 386SX laptops, with 4MB of RAM, on long-term loan from work around 1992. One was quite chunky, the 2nd was a slimline thing with an off-centre hinge.
I ran OS/2 2.0 on them both.
So I could run multiple DOS apps, and a WinOS2 VM containing Windows 3.0, meaning I could run Win16 apps as well. And native OS/2 apps, although I didn't have many.
Here's a pic of the original Librex:
https://books.google.im/books?id=tDwEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA27&redir_...
And the 2nd model:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/10gepdd/l...
TL;DR
A 386 with 4MB is small now but at the time this was a fairly serious workstation-level PC. At the time my work desktop was a 386DX but it had only 1MB of RAM.
In its time a 4MB 386 could run any one of multiple multitasking 32-bit protected-mode OSes, including OS/2 2.x, SCO Xenix, Coherent 3 or 4, DR Concurrent DOS/386, and so on.
This was a high-end bit of kit and with one of these OSes, or even with Quarterdeck DESQview, it could multitask half a dozen large and demanding DOS apps, or maybe a couple of the still fairly new Windows apps such as WinWord 1, or Excel 2.
Replies
My first Linux box was a 386SX with 3 megs of RAM (1 meg on the motherboard plus a 2 meg expansion.) It was a tight fit (SLS Linux, I think?) This would've been around 1992 or 93.
I had a 386SX-16 running OS/2 from 2.1 to 3.0. It was usually fine, you could multitask several OS/2 and DOS applications or a WinOS2 session. It was very easy to get it swapping, though, and when it was swapping, it ground to a halt. It helped a lot putting 8MB on it, though 4 of those were on an ISA card and very slow.
That's a wonderful machine. I'd love to see that style of keyboard on new stuff.
Its wild to me to think of how much old computers could do relative to new. WordPerfect for DOS was always responsive and quick wheb I used it. I've seen ms word cludge up machines that should have plenty of power to run a word processor.