alt Hacker News> Technically, the Am386 could run Windows 95, but it wasn’t a great experience.
Technically not. It can run it. Was slow? Yes, but my Am386DX40 keep working fine from 1991 to 1996. Running DR-DOS 6, MS-DOS 6.11, Windows 3.1 and finally Windows 95. And, of course, I could play DooM 2 on it. At some point, I got a math copro. Finally, my father upgraded the machine with an AMD 486DX5 133MHz.
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snarfy • yesterday at 5:20 PM
Which math copro? If you had a 386DX then I believe you had the math copro? The 386SX did not have an FPU and needed the additional 387SX.
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iberator • yesterday at 2:33 PM
NETBSD still can run on it too :) Best and most portable os in the history
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My father got me a second-hand computer with Am386DX-40 somewhere around 1997, IIRC. An upgrade to older 286.
It was two generations old at that time but still a lot of fun: it could run a lot of games (incl. DOOM, of course), programming (largely Turbo Pascal 7), and some word processing under Windows 3.11.
I didn't bother with Win95, though.
I've been using it up until 1999, when I finally got a then-modern computer with Windows 98. But in some ways MS-DOS felt more capable - I really knew what each file is for, what computer is doing, etc. I.e. the entire machine is fully comprehensible. You really don't get it with Windows unless you're Russinovich or something.
So in a way 386 was a peak computer for me