Can you still use a 386 for modern work?

If you can find a Disk-On-Module you can even convert them to SSD. Just install Windows 3.1 on Dos 5.0 or 6.22, install Word 6.0 and Excel 4.0 and you are set.

Yes, even most 16 bit micro computers can still be useful for some stuff wordprocessing, if you have the right softwares.

You know, it might work as a thin client

>suggesting to install TempleOS a x86-64 OS requiring 512MB RAM
>in a thread about 80386s
>with an image about ARM processors

Terry warned us about niggers like you.

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Yes. Word processing and spreadsheets mostly. Early windows games (WEP,etc) would run good.

WP hasn't changed that much over the years. The basic shit which is what most people do can all be done under fucking Dos versions of Word/Wordperfect/Works for instance.

You can't run Half-Life 2, or even HL2, on a 486

You could run DOS/Windows 3.1 & still have a lot of usefulness out of it. If you still have a parallel port printer with drivers for it, it'll still work. You can run MS-Word 6, MS-Excel 4 or even Lotus 1-2-3 for office-related tasks like word processing & spreadsheets. Plenty of games are still floating around for DOS & 16-bit Windows as well (including emulators like NESticle, ZSNES, GeneCyst, Stella...). The only thing you might miss is an internet connection, but you have to remember that these computers were made back in the day when people actually had to get out of their rooms, go to a public library & look through a legitimate encyclopedia book for research, instead of relying on a wiki filled with shitposts from people who don't know how to be objective about facts.

Yes, install early version of encarta and you’ve got a decent interactive encyclopedia at your fingertips for research too

second comma shouldn't have been there

Shame.

Not exactly; Encarta didn't have complete articles in earlier versions like Encarta 1994,) plus you'd still be locked into a digital encyclopedia that couldn't be updated to take note of current events (as a matter of fact, the last version of Encarta was made before the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11).

>The only thing you might miss is an internet connection
My 486 machine has an ISA ethernet card. All you need are a packet driver in your config.sys and both a TCP stack for your network applications on DOS and a Winsock that supports ethernet cards on Win3.1. There are quite a lot of networking programs available, and on windows 3.1, even with only 8MB of RAM, browsers like opera and internet explorer 5 will allow you to check quite a few websites for softwares and infos. Web browsing in windows 3.1 is definitely more comfortable than on classic macos (IE5 and classilla are sluggish as hell on my powermac G3, and IE4 can't even connect to many websites -- all i ever do on that one is check gopher stuff and idle on IRC, 'cause ircle is quite nice).
When it comes to DOS-based web browsers tho, I don't recall how the older versions were, but those new gpl arachne versions sure are garbage -- slower than browsers on windows despite having all ressources at hand, and it can't even display most pages that ie 5 and opera can.

In other words, considering that you have both the hardware & the drivers available to you, you can still use your DOS/Windows 3.1 machine like any normie would use a tablet, plus more since no normie uses word processing anymore.

Also, there's always the Arachne web browser.

Nigga you can't even run the first one on a 386.

depends on what you mean by "real work" and unfortunately, jerking off in a terminal is not real work

>He's never had to download pixelated 300x400 px porn JPEGs over dial-up back in the day
Trust me; miking the mongoose in a terminal was real work back than.

You cant even run a modern OS

Why do you need a current OS to make an old machine useful? See

to run current software like modern emulators that run games 99.99999999% perfectly

A lot of the content on encarta would still be relevant tho. Historical articles and so on. But yes, it would be lacking some minor additions from the last 30 years or so.

You don't go on social media shit and other javascript-heavy websites on such computers. First you might not even be able to access them in the first place thanks to https and certificates. Then, if you didn't think about disabling scripts the second you go on such websites they'll fucking lock your computer thanks to the abnormal amount of scripts running at the same time and all the instructions perceived errors -- they make 1.4GHz pentium 4 go sluggish, so imagine how it would be on a 33MHz 486. Lastly if you ever get on them and have scripts disabled you'll still have some unusable page. To check out pages that are near 100% plain text or older pages it's perfect tho.
Also like I said arachne on DOS is sluggish garbage compared to any windows 3.1 browser.

Yes, like NESTicle, GeneCyst, ZSNES and Stella 1.3... Which all ran at near native speed on 386 hardware, you retard.

It's not the OS that determines how fast another program works; it's the CPU.

I never said anything on browsing NSA-friendly websites, though.

It's only relevant so long as it's complete (for example, read an article on Yassir Arafat from Encarta 1994, vs. 1998; the 1994 article's only a stub).

>Which all ran at near native speed
with 1 billion bugs and glitches

>I never said anything on browsing NSA-friendly websites, though.
You did imply it when saying "you can still use your DOS/Windows 3.1 machine like any normie would use a tablet", 'cause that's exactly what they do.

>ZSNES
On a 386? I think it skipped frames on my 486SX.

>486SX
>Mac users detected

>Can you still use a 386 for modern work?
Sure, if that modern work requires a paperweight

Who are you quoting?

Do you even know what a fucking 486SX is

Dumb fucking zoomer

>NESTicle, GeneCyst, ZSNES
>Which all ran at near native speed on 386 hardware
What's it like living in bizarro world? You'd be lucky enough if you could get Doom running at 5 frames per second with the screen size set to minimum, never mind console emulators. Have you ever even used a 386?

Sure, even an SX-16 can reliably process shitloads of data much faster than you or any other living human could ever hope to do in their lifetimes, though you'd probably have to alter your workflow to accommodate for the fact that no system from that period is going to be able to multitask as well as a modern machine with 4-8 processors and gigabytes of RAM.
Basically,

I think he more meant in principle, rather than literally.

As long as you don't touch the JS-infested web, definitely.

This

You're an idiot. Older web browsers still work; only sites that depend heavily on JavaScript malware & spying won't display on older browsers like Arachne.

best bet would be NetBSD or OpenBSD on a 486DX or some clock-multiplied variant thereof, you could even get away with running current Netscape on it if you built from source and turned off *all* floating point code-gen less plain old 487 support

What do the green digits in front of the case mean?

Megahertz...ahh those were the times!

fake clock frequency status

This was back in the day when PCs had a turbo button to slow down the CPU, giving you the illusion of your software actually speeding up.

But that placebo effect that made you fell like you were running full throttle...small and delicious details of a Golden Era that this newfags will never understand.

It wasn't an illusion, games and certain software was just poorly programmed and things like framerate were tied directly to clock speed, so when computers started getting faster games would run too fast, the turbo button limited clock speed for backwards compatibility.

>Can you still use a 386 for modern work?
For the sort of stuff that most Windows PCs are used for, yes. That's why Microsoft is so big on backwards compatibility and why Windows XP lives so long.

Depends on what your modern work is.

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what is with this schizo thai nigger his shilling makes no sense

lol

I'm thinking about buying an old computer too, user. Run plan 9 or something and do programming as a hobby.

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If you're murrican beware of the prices you guys have a nasty market thanks to your youtubers.

The bowling alley i go to still uses 386s.

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