On Sunday, 11 June 2017 22:32:33 UTC+1, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Sun, 11 Jun 2017 12:17:14 -0700 (PDT), tabbypurr wrote:

My slowest machine ever was a 486 that hung around long
past its best before date. It never skipped a beat in its
entire life, and was occasionally useful (partly to
punish users that screwed machines up). I once virus
scanned it - it started scanning the first file after
16 minutes! With carefully chosen apps it ran ok, though
the 256 colour graphics were grim.
NT

I have to guess the dates, but I think between 1987 and 2014, I ran a
Xenix mail server in my palatial office on a 486DX2-66 system with
4MBytes (that's MegaBytes, not GigaBytes) RAM, 1GB Conner CFP-1060S
SCSI hard disk, and an assortment of tape drives and SCSI peripherals.
At various points during its 27 year life, I replaced the motherboard
once, power supply twice, and video card thrice, but never reloaded
the Xenix operating system. If you don't mind character based
computing from the command line, the machine ran just fine and was
very fast for most things. I kept waiting for the machine to die so
would have an excuse to replace it with something more modern, but it
just wouldn't die. So, I killed it and gave it a proper funeral at
the local recycler.

Also, I used to maintain some CNC controllers, that ran commodity 486
motherboards behind the fancy exterior. Until recently, I had a
fairly good stock of replacement 486 motherboards, EISA, ISA, VESA,
and VL bus cards for fixing these.

Anything can run command line & single app, even an Apple II. Add multitasking & GUI and it's another story.

I had an impressive 24M RAM, but ISTR the HDD was just 100s of M. So many times I hoped it would die. So did people that used it. But it never did. Many more modern PCs came & died, but not that 486. I guess you got a better machine when they cost well over £1000 new.


NT