A new 386-based palmtop recently appeared on Aliexpress and was covered by sites like Tom’s Hardware. My curiosity was stoked and I quickly snapped one up.

With the recent attention on ChatGPT and OpenAI’s release of their APIs, many developers have developed clients for modern platforms to talk to this super smart AI chatbot. However I’m pretty sure almost nobody has written one for a vintage platform like MS-DOS.

The first computer I used as a kid was a 486 PC back in 1995. My family upgraded past it and it was disposed of. However very recently, someone in the local tech community donated a 486 motherboard to me. This gave me an opportunity to relive some of my childhood!

I recently purchased a new-old motherboard. It’s a motherboard released in 2020 but not the usual you would expect of the latest motherboard released this year that support the latest CPUs and connectivity options. This motherboard supports a CPU first released in 1979 (Intel 8088) and comes with historic connectivity options like serial and parallel.

In October 2019, my company SP Digital held an internal hackathon. My colleague Subhransu and I worked on a whacky idea of writing a brand-new Windows 3.1 app which was an OS released almost 30 years ago. The idea we chose was a Slack client. After all, Slack clients exist for most platforms but I’m certain one does not exist for Windows 3.1.

The last primary keyboard I’ll use in my life might be the IBM Model M. It’ll probably last me the decades to the day that keyboards should become obsolete. - Kheng Meng, 2018

What is the oldest x86 processor that is still supported by a modern Linux kernel in present time?

The Covox Speech Thing (CST) was a sound card released in 1986 by Covox, Inc to enable computers with parallel ports to have sound capability. Unlike modern machines, proper sound support was not a given on computers in that era and the Soundblaster by Creative has yet to be released.

(This is a long 5600+ words post, I recommend reading this from a tablet or computer)

(This is a long ~2900 words post, I recommend reading this from a tablet or computer)