Here are my notes on running NetBSD 10.1 on my first personal laptop that I still keep, a 1998 i586 Toshiba Satellite Pro with 81Mb of RAM and a 1Gb IBM 2.5″ IDE HD. In summary, the latest NetBSD runs well on this old hardware using an IDE to CF adapter and several changes to the i386 GENERIC kernel.
↫ Joel P.
I don’t think the BSD world – and NetBSD in particular – gets enough recognition for supporting both weird architectures and old hardware as well as it does. This here is a 26 year old laptop running the latest version of NetBSD, working X11 server and all, while other operating systems drop support for devices only a few years old. So many devices could be saved from toxic landfills if only more people looked beyond Windows and macOS.
While cool it is rather pointless.
Make it so that nations have proper recycling laws instead.
Sure there are cases (for example my not even 10 year old macbook) where its basically ridicolous (sic!) that it wont get any updates. But a machine that is 25 years old can hardly be used for browsing todays web.
For this exact reason, machines this old tend to be perfect for distraction-free development/writing/email.
To drive your point even further home, yes it could turn into a NAS file server and it would be fine, or a game emulator console. However, you could likely do the same thing with a Raspberry Pi or the like with much less power draw. Its so inefficient, it would only make sense if you were off grid and had an excess in power generation, that couldn’t be otherwise utilized for whatever reason.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
There is a balance to be had, How many watthours will a product use in a year versus how many watthours does it take to recycle it and replace it into something new? While energy consumption has a clear impact on carbon emissions, it doesn’t really end there. What externalized costs should we tack onto old ewaste ending up in landfills and how long can this go on indefinitely without having to recycle/clean it up? Or worse being shipped to 3rd world countries
“Burning old TVs to survive: The toxic trade in electrical waste”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gvq1rd0geo
In theory we can factor everything in and we could rationalize a specific optimal number of years for various electronics. However I suspect that the average consumer electronics and home appliances are becoming ewaste too quickly; short product lifespans are not justified on an efficiency basis.
This topic would make an excellent osnews article on it’s own.
Yes, that would be a good topic, and something to be mindful of. In my case I have several raspberry pis of different ages hanging around from old projects currently unused as well as some older laptops/pcs. So its not a matter of purchasing anything new, just which one to repurpose.
I run a lot of old kit so I wonder sometimes if I am being irresponsible with power draw. However,, my electricity is hydroelectric so the environmental impact ( now that the dams are built ) is fairly minimal. Also, I have to heat my home much of the year and so waste heat is not really wasted.
Using this stuff is probably better for the environment than throwing it out or manufacturing something new.
Oblivious — disagree: it’s not pointless.
the point is to demonstrate that a modern OS can run on this 25-yr-old system.
And since it has X11, etc, then that means it can run the latest Firefox — which can easily handle today’s web-swamp.
A 25 year old system may run firefox, but it won’t run it very fast. maybe everyone would do it for other reasons, but an ad blocker would also be very helpful speeding it up. I only ad block when they’re compromising the site, out of consideration for the content creators. But here, I don’t think it would be worth it.
Another possibility would be to get a version of something like WordPerfect and make it just a writing machine. No distractions, word processing only to finish off that script/novel you’ve always been wanting to write.
Lawyers always loved WordPerfect but it seems a lot of the great writers really loved WordStar. So, maybe this is the ticket:
http://wordtsar.ca/
ponk,
Firefox isn’t going to run on 81MB of ram with modern websites without swapping like crazy. Someone may do this just to show that it can be done, but I don’t think anybody would seriously consider it a daily driver. Maybe you meant that it can be used as a thin client for modern software and browsers running on another newer computer. That could work, but then you may as well just use the other computer instead and eliminate the need for two computers. I’m sure there are niche and contrived situations where it can make sense, but most people’s software needs probably require newer hardware.
Still, we’ve been incredibly fortunate that software portability on x86 computers has been so good to us. This is an area where nearly all other hardware architectures have failed us and their manufacturers deserve to be scolded for it. I’ve had several occasions when I wanted to repurpose old phones. There are hundreds of millions of these things getting thrown out every year. The hardware is very powerful & capable for DIY projects….I’d love to save these old phone from ewaste rather than spending hundreds on new hardware, This would be an excellent opportunity for reuse, however the damn things are so jailed and limited from a software standpoint. Re-provisioning them as generic hardware with a new modern OS becomes infeasible for most of us. This is such a shameful state of affairs.
It amazes me what even very old hardware can do. A lot of the “real” work I need to do is basically just documents which old systems still handle fine. A Song of Ice and Fire was written on Wordstar after all. I do my taxes on the same ancient machine every year. Program using something like neovim? No problem. Wasting time on sites like OSnews? That old system may run your web browser well enough after all. Much of what we do is I/O or network constrained as well. Downloading torrents? Is your CPU really the limiting factor? I don’t need much of a machine to read recipes in the kitchen or read eBooks in bed. This machine would do both just fine.
But a lot of what we do these days is not actually happening on our computer. I ssh into various systems. Even very old hardware makes more than a good enough terminal to do that and what I am doing on the other end runs just as fast. I run a Proxmox server as a home lab. More and more of what I do is on “remote” desktops where my local machine is mostly a keyboard, screen, and pointing device. How old the machine I am touching is hardly matters even if I am running machine learning models or transcoding video. And what about “the cloud”? I can run terraform on a 20 year old machine that deploys dozens of VMs or containers in Azure. And how much local horsepower do I need to run the AWS CLI?
Even gaming can be fun on old kit. Nevermind the text based stuff or solitaire even. I bet this machine would still run Pingus, DevilutionX, or Wargus..
LeFantome,
I do a lot of that too. But the thing is SSH/VNC/etc don’t cover 100% of my laptop needs. I still need to buy a modern laptop anyway, in which case I don’t foresee a situation where I’d want to use the Toshiba instead (maybe as a backup, but even then it probably wouldn’t cut it for me)
It just seems like I’d be going out of my way to use the old Toshiba. I appreciate how booting up old hardware can be a fun hobby, but the practical applications do seem rather contrived. At what point can we concede that using an old 1990s Toshiba laptop is more sentimental than practical? Even if it’s just for SSH, you can save a 2015 era laptop from the trash, it’d be more capable than the 1998 toshiba with 64bit OS & software support, more disk, more ram, while probably consuming less electricity in the process.
Windows indeed could never do that, Apple falls short too.
This is pretty amazing, and NetBSD does indeed deserve credit, but I am pretty sure that Adelie Linux would run on that machine as well.
https://www.adelielinux.org/about/
Adelie requires 64 MB of RAM. The website brags that Adelie will run on a Mac G3 “no problem” and those were still selling new in 1998.
@Alfman
I did not mean to suggest that a 1998 Toshiba should be your only laptop. And I am not suggesting that you show up at a client with a machine that old either ( though I do sometimes join video meetings on machines as old as 2009 ). and I have taken my 2013 Macbook Air to visit clients when I am not expecting to present. It still looks surprisingly attractive and would run the website fast enough if it had to. It is the machine I take out and about the most as, well I truly enjoy using it, it would not be a big deal if it somehow got damaged, lost, or stolen. I am sitting in a Starbuck’s with it now.
I may be unusual in that I use several laptops regularly including Macbooks from 2009, 2012, 2013, and 2017. I do my taxes on a machine I have been using pretty much only for that since 2005. The laptop I take to the office gets used in my home office as well but rarely gets unplugged and moved around the house as I have several others on hand elsewhere. I have one I use in the living room and one in the bedroom for example. Sometimes I leave one in the car. I could take a video meeting on any of them if I had to, or surf the web, or mess around with whatever ( like maybe making a new cports package for Chimera Linux as I may do in a few minutes ).
If the machine I am on is too slow, I can always SSH, RDP, or just use the browser interface to Proxmox ( noVNC I think ). I can Twingate into my home network from pretty much anything so it does not matter where I am.
Anyway, I totally hear you so this is not meant to be an argument. I just find that a lot of people consider 5 year old computers “useless” whereas I was using a 2009 Macbook Pro this morning and enjoying how well its awesome keyboard and 17″ screen paired with the still-Alpha COSMIC desktop written in Rust ( all quite modern I would say ). What I was doing on it was editing Terraform scripts while I waited for the bacon to brown in the oven. I probably could have been doing that on this Toshiba ( though maybe not running COSMIC ). That said, I would certainly not want the Toshiba to be my only machine. We agree on that. And it is a decade older than anything I use regularly so I am not sure how much I would use it if I had one. If I only had two laptops though, I bet I would use it quite a bit. And if it was truly the only computer I could get access to, I bet I could still learn Python on it or use it to access the free tier of Oracle Cloud with its 24 GB of RAM and 200 GB of storage.
Again you are right though. I found the 2009 Macbook Pro mentioned above when I went to drop off some bottles and cans at the recycling depot a couple of years ago.
LeFantome,
I understand. I don’t mean to be critical of your use cases. I buy used machines to bring to work no less. I typically get used high end hardware a couple generations older. I’m not bothered by it not being the latest and greatest. It’s just that when it comes to the specific hardware in this article dating back to 1998, we need to remember that during that period the difference of a year or two had such a dramatic impact on user experience. Even someone from early 2000s would have shunned the 1998 system. Hardware was improving so fast that you were seriously held back if you didn’t upgrade. These days that’s not really the case. Hardware from 10 years ago can still be very useful especially if it was a high performing system to begin with. I tend to overprovision RAM on the basis that I’ll probably be using the computers for a very long time and I may as well get the most out of it from the start.
Yeah. but (at the risk of seeming inconsistent with my previous paragraph) waiting on slow computers is one of my gripes. I feel in this day and age technology should be beyond operators having to wait on machines. I get annoyed if I have to wait for a webpage or application to load. Perhaps it’s a “me” problem, haha. As a dev I put extra effort into optimizing software and leaning towards lightweight solutions that don’t require tons of CPU horsepower to run well, but I often get the impression that many people don’t really care or appreciate optimal software as much as I do.
I’m not the type of person to say that, but I know the type. I think for many people it’s about “Keeping up with the Joneses”.