Found my old 286 motherboard I used from 1990 to 1993 before upgrading to
a--gasp!--386SX16 with 8MB of RAM!  Ooooo!

Anyway, it dredged up a memory of something I found a few years back 

Everyone knows that Linux as a user OS **used to be** only for 386 and
above.  286s and 8086/8088s were out of the loop, leaving them with
crusty old Xenix or even MSDOS/PCDOS/DRDOS for their OS. 

Then someone said, "hey, lets recompile Linux for embedded systems!"  And
an entire new industry, using state of the art hardware, was born.

And someone else, in 1995, said, "lets recompile Linux for 8086/8088 and
80286 systems as well!" And an entire new industry, using ancient
machines which previously had been gathering [or crumbling into] dust,
was born, in the form of ELKS (Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset).  Also
known as Linux-8086.

http://elks.sourceforge.net/

Its a fun system to play with (for a given value of "fun").  They have
boot/kernel and root disks to boot up a base system (sorry, its all Linux
>From Scratch, no handy distro on six floppies yet) so you can get a feel
for it.  And it runs great on a 286 with 4MB of RAM!  Not that you can do
much, but it still runs great!  :)  Now all I need is an ELKS version of
LILO, and I can create a 286 dual-boot machine, to boot into ELKS or DOS.

They're up to a 0.1.3-pre1 kernel (July 2003!).  The kernel needs 200K
(thats a K, not a MB) of RAM, and a full system will require 400K to 512K
of RAM.  It will run on IBM PC hardware and on Psion SiBO (Sixteen Bit
Organizer) palmtop computer.

Now, you're stuck with mounting Minix filesystems, but you can use
virtual consoles, do simple serial I/O over a serial SLIP link, and even
use swap files or partitions to increase the available amount of RAM!  So
be sure to stick a disk in drive B: for swap space.  :)

=====
[this message has been checked by professional 
 political activists and found to be clear of any 
 political rants whatsoever, including any requiring 
 the swinging of a bat at one's head]

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