Slightly off-topic, but the only time I've ever used Windows 3.1 (beyond the odd virtualization experiment every once in a while) was on a laptop with a passive-matrix monochrome LCD, so seeing this OS in color always feels a bit wrong to me.
I think it was a Compaq LTE Lite, likely an early model. It was a relative's device (he's working in the insurance industry) and I was only toying around with it in the late '90s, when it was already obsolete.
Researching this laptop, I found a hilarious contemporary ad that is very full of itself and pulls no punches against the competitors:
These were very expensive, like all laptops at the time, so it's no surprise it's shown being used by executives. I'm impressed by how many now common features it already had. I think they aren't showing the cheapest variant with the passive-matrix display in this video, which looked very dim and unpleasant.
Frist thing that comes to mind is write a hello world program XD
I’d probably play around with the OS too. Maybe buy a book to help me explore all the “new” features. I recently found an old palmtop computer with an old school touch screen on my parent’s attic. I had lots of fun figuring out how that thing worked and now I’m trying to tweak it.
Gta5 download size is around 90GB, and Rdr2 download size is around 150GB, so let’s assume GTA6 growth in filesize is the same percentage as gta5 to rdr2, which is around 167%, GTA6 will be around 250GB. From a quick google, the largest capacity floppy is 2.8MB, then it will require 91,428 floppy discs to fit just the installation file.
A floppy disk is 3.3mm in height, so without taking into account that a large stack would be rather compressed further down, the theoretical height of this stack would be about 300 meters, which is right in between the roof and the tip of the antenna of the Chrysler Building in NYC.
I would reckon it would be as powerful as the last most powerful machine to support Windows 9x (WinME falls under that category) since they were DOS-based.
You can still buy new MS-DOS computers, for use with legacy equipment and software, like industrial machinery. The most powerful CPU this company is offering is a Pentium D from 2006:
For an extra $95, they'll pre-install MS-DOS 6.22 for you, but it will of course only use 64 MB of the 1 GB RAM the machine comes with. That's a luxurious amount already. I've never used more than 48 MB with MS DOS and it was already more than plenty.
Motherboards for the LGA 775 socket were among the last to support ISA cards, which are why companies buy these new legacy computers in the first place. There's machinery out there worth millions and running entire factories, complex scientific instruments or medical equipment that requires interfacing with ISA cards. I've seen this myself and fixed a few of these systems. It's fun to take a machine off the factory floor that has been quietly doing its job for many decades. You wouldn't believe how much of the world is running on truly ancient hardware.
While it would be theoretically possible to e.g. create a new hardware interface and compatible software, this would not only be prohibitively expensive on its own, but require costly and lengthy certification on top, which just isn't feasible most of the time. That's where PCs like these come in. They may seem outrageously expensive given the ancient hardware they consist of, but compared to the equipment they'll be used with, they might as well be free - and on top of that, they come with a warranty, support hotline, etc. - unlike cobbling something together from old parts found on ebay.
Last week i had to fix a cut and bend machine of that kind ( essentially it cuts steel sheets to a specific lenght with a guillotine and bends it into shape with an hydraulic press); it was originally just a cutter and the bending half was added afterwards: the cutter with the HID ran on a 486 board with a dos clone and was connected to the bender’s controller board via an isa card; i checked the bender’s board and it turned out to be a 6502 board… Talk about ol’reliable. I ended up needing to replace the 486 board with a pentium board( thankfully there are “industrial” boards with isa slots still made for older pentiums) and running everything trough freedos because someone slammed the steel sheets in the control cabin while feeding them in the machine. I was surpised to find a 6502 based embedded computer running with equipment that came standard with a flat panel monitor for the HID, but i guess when the machine’s minimum lifespan is marked in decades you go for well tested stuff.
I am still resisting the temptation to go back there, dump the roms and reverse engineer the whole thing though
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