My 486 was a VESA localbus. … ie not PCI. It was superior in its time, but never made it into the Pentium series.
We once had a 286 running SCO Unix. All it ever did was talk on a modem.
if you go back even further, there were a whole range of innovative PC designs. They all disappeared when IBM started making PC’s. I remembrr seeing a z80 system running Onyx, and Cromemco 68000 system running Cromix. There is a long history of Unix in PC’s
Yeah - I had one of those - 1994 - 8 MB RAM - Cirrus Logic VLBus GPU with a whopping 1 MB of VRAM! A bit later I scored another of the same VLBus graphics cards, and was able to tease the VRam chips off it (sort of ZIF - not soldered) and double the RAM in the graphics card… in 1995 I got it up to 20 MB of RAM…
In 1996 I got a dual pentium CPU mobo with a single 133 Mhz CPU and 32 MB RAM… wasn’t able to afford a 2nd Pentium 133 until 1997… Ran Windows 3.51, 4.0 and Slackware on it…
That Intel Panther EL486 is a bit of a hybrid, it has PCI - AND - EISA slots! I DETEST EISA what a monumental PITA that kludge was, just so customers could either run stock ISA cards, or better faster 32 bit EISA cards… Meh! It also had onboard SCSI - but they only made drivers for Windows NT 3.1 and Novell Netware and Windows 3.11 - never got the SCSI to work in Linux… Someone in the netherlands however, had a bunch of them and he wrote a Linux driver for the onboard NIC and it got accepted into the kernel…
Man there were some SHOCKING bus attempts out there… Apple’s NUBUS, and Sun’s SBUS were pretty awful… as was SGI’s… And there was VLBus (which had several variations)… IBM tried to divorce itself from ISA (which it forgot to patent) with 32 bit MCA (microchannel) which nobody was interested in paying a license for - so Intel released EISA, while it worked on PCI… For a while there was also AGP - but thankfully PCIe came along… just in time…
I had external SCSI on the 486, driven by a VLB SCSI card. Had disks, quiktape, cdwriter all on external scsi. One internal scsi disk that I booted from.
Had Suns with sbus. Could not keep up with the data rate of a video, but still a mile better than ISA. Those AT series boxes with ISA were slow. PCI made a huge difference.
Well we well and truly hijacked this thread (the Aussies)…
Anyway - I just took TinyCore for a little test drive in VirtualBox and must say I’m pretty amazed… it’s LIGHTNING fast!
Trying it on my Pi Zero 2W - and it can’t seem to get past boot (after generating key pairs)…
Anyway - definitely a worthy contender for something you could run on an XP era laptop… When I get around to it and I can find my Samsung N150 and its power brick, I might take a look at TinyCore on it…
I think I’ve got a USB problem on that Pi - just tried to boot Raspbian again with a monitor connected and neither keyboard will respond - so maybe the issue’s USB or my board, and not either OS…
Makes the thread more interesting 
Although I wonder about
If @HelenPixels will give any of these a try,
sure would be interesting to find out if anything so far has helped her ?
OR
go sort of off topic and hijack again until . . . :
@artytux
This post motivated me to try a i686 Gentoo install on an old Acer PC I have
collecting dust. It only has a 1 core AMD Athlon64 +3500 cpu, and had Windows
Vista Basic installed. I put in a 500GB spinner drive formatted and installed
WVB to the first 160GB partition, after several hrs with MS on the phone, was finally
able to achieve activation.
Did an extended partition with three partitions for Gentoo and am now compiling Gentoo
packages. The PC is so slow, I am having to compile packages manually. Did not even
try to set a profile, just compiled the kernel and grub so I could boot the CLI, so now I am
compiling the packages needed for the profile.
Is it worth it? No!! Just something to do!!!
WVB still runs well on the old PC, just isn’t much one can do with the OS.
It is rather like my first Gentoo attempt on a Pentium laptop. I never got past the CLI. Compiling was an overnight job. You should get a usable system if you persist… use a small DTE … Gnome or KDE will kill it.
WvB… you would probably be better off with DOS.
It is just a play thing, not going to spend much more time on the machine!!! I do not even know of
a browser that would support that old hardware, a shame MS trashed Internet Explorer.
My Pentium runs Xfce and firefox.
It takes firefox about 30 sec to start up
That is what I was hoping for, got to get the xorg-server compiled first.
Almost have the xorg-server compiled!!! Found a way to compile media-libs/mesa
without it pulling in llvm, hope it works.
Now, I can run equery g xorg-server and display a list of dependencies, how can I
use the cat command to display in.txt?
I think what you mean is … equery makes a long output… how an you scroll it preserving the color.
Do you have less ? That would be better than cat. more does not work as well
equery … | less might work
cat will not page it for you. You are on a CLI terminal, you need pageing.
Will give it a try!!!
Either the nouveau nvidia did not load or something, all I have is a black screen!!!
I got it, kept fooling with the .initrc script until startx worked. Am now in the process of
compiling Mate.