Linux on older machines

[Rich Braun]

I started out with Linux in December 1992 with a 25MHz 386, 4Mb of RAM, and
a 100Mb hard drive (I had bought the system new in the summer of '89 back
when 4Mb was an inconceivably huge amount of memory, and you had to buy
kludges from companies like Quarterdeck to make use of it.)

Although I upgraded it the next month to a gig of disk and 8Mb of RAM
(and shortly thereafter swapped it out for a 486 with 16Mb), a year or
so later I wound up putting the 386 back into service as a terminal
server.

I installed 48 serial ports on it, and a few dozen local companies came
to depend on this setup for their 56K leased-line CSU/DSU and dedicated
28.8K modem ISP service for about three years until finally the motherboard
died.  It was one of the most reliable Internet hookups around, and the
the CPU was fine for the task (the serial ports were ordinary 16550 UARTs,
not those fancy Digiboard smart controllers).

As for the realities of Linux in 1999, keep in mind that a lot of new
stuff has been added since 1992.  I was already used to doing
everything with a command-line prompt (DOS or a Unix shell), and it
wasn't a bother for me to download the source code to most packages
(much of which was already familiar to me, and at the time not
necessarily ported to Linux yet) and wait several minutes to an hour
for it to compile.  The hundred-meg hard drive was plenty to hold most
everything Linux-related that you could squeeze through a 14,400-baud
modem, then state-of-the-art.

Having just spent the Christmas holiday in the company of a 7-year-old who
got his mom's hand-me-down Pentium with Win98 sometime last year, and seen
him ignore the huge pile of traditional gifts in favor of video games
(running on either the Windoze box or a Playstation), my bets are against
a 386 capturing the interest of most kids.

But, yours isn't 'most kids', so it's certainly worth a try--just be prepared
to do a major upgrade in short order (as I did with my 386 when Linux came
along and gave me something more interesting to do than run DesqView or
Windows 3.1).

-rich
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