For a more capable but still underpowered computer, I found Antix can run well in almost 20year old hardware - I use it in an EEEPC 4G Surf, but I modded it to have more storage recently.
hyperhello•Aug 21, 2026
Black and white photoshop, yes.
retrac•Aug 21, 2026
I'm reminded that chips like the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 were not intended to be general-purpose computers, and were originally designed mostly to be embedded controllers and as building blocks for "real" computers like terminal and disk controllers.
I suppose in principle the RPi Pico could self-host its own OS and devel environment. 520 KB of RAM in the old days was plenty to fit an OS and compiler. No MMU so no paging though.
ant6n•Aug 21, 2026
Which “old days” would those be. Sounds like it would be 50 years ago
benj111•Aug 21, 2026
64k was acceptable 40 years ago.
duskwuff•Aug 21, 2026
> I suppose in principle the RPi Pico could self-host its own OS and devel environment. 520 KB of RAM in the old days was plenty to fit an OS and compiler.
With two cheap PSRAM chips and a bit of trickery, you can upgrade that to 32(.5) MB, which is certainly enough to run a small OS.
In principle you can add even more memory with bank switching, but 32 MB is the limit for a flat address space.
benj111•Aug 21, 2026
Window 95 ran on 8mb of ram.
The first Amigas had 512k of ram. Both had much less processing power.
With 32mb you could probably run some kind of Linux.
abanana•Aug 21, 2026
Well, the first Amigas had only 256KB of RAM. Doubling that to 512KB (via a memory expansion card) was a luxury!
Clamchop•Aug 21, 2026
Even better, 8MiB was recommended for Windows 95 but it minimally required just 4.
skipkey•Aug 21, 2026
When I first ran linux you could boot it off of a 1.2mb floppy. The 486 I ran it on had 4mb of ram at the time, later upgraded to 16mb.
mikepurvis•Aug 21, 2026
uCLinux was a real thing for a good long while, though I think at this point real microprocessors are cheap, simple, and widely available enough that there hasn't been much need.
joshuaissac•Aug 21, 2026
Caveat: 60p RP2350 microcontroller on a board that sells for $40 and has 8MB of RAM (as opposed to the 520K that the RP2350 comes with). But that is only needed for Photoshop. The 520K is more than enough to emulate the Mac 128K.
utopcell•Aug 21, 2026
How much does the monitor cost?
sieve•Aug 21, 2026
I am using the Xteink X4 as my primary e-reader now-a-days. Simple ESP32 microcontroller. Plastic+glass shell with an e-ink screen. MicroSD card works like a cache. Battery lasts for weeks. Works great.
Don't get me wrong. I like modern CPUs with huge caches and incredible power, but you do not need this for most devices. Also leads to lazy programming practices and calculators consuming hundreds of megabytes of RAM.
vardump•Aug 21, 2026
"easily adds 4Mb RAM". A bit misleading way to say 512 kB RAM.
boznz•Aug 21, 2026
I'm currently building a RP2350 board with the HDMI/USB and I2S Audio I have also added the 16MB SRAM and higher vCore for overclocking which the RP2350 supports for a similar personal project to this. My first PCB had a few newbie mistakes which due to my lousy hand/eye coordination I wasnt able to fix so I am spinning up a V2 to go to JLPCB in the next week or two (https://rodyne.com/?p=3999). Your post resonated with a lot of why I am doing it so keep up the good work.
tomcam•Aug 21, 2026
I am thrilled by this. While the world is understandably complaining about the price of RAM and CPU I keep thinking about the demo scene or people like this. In the worst case scenario, we could retool our lives to some extent using optimized version of older tech.
kbrannigan•Aug 21, 2026
This is wonderful and amazing.
Computing can be very simple. I think constraints and hardware restrictions can unlock creativity.
Imagine running an GPT-3 Generation model on a raspberry pi . This would be great
Markstar•Aug 21, 2026
I wish I had time to fiddle with stuff like this. sigh
10 Comments
I suppose in principle the RPi Pico could self-host its own OS and devel environment. 520 KB of RAM in the old days was plenty to fit an OS and compiler. No MMU so no paging though.
With two cheap PSRAM chips and a bit of trickery, you can upgrade that to 32(.5) MB, which is certainly enough to run a small OS.
In principle you can add even more memory with bank switching, but 32 MB is the limit for a flat address space.
The first Amigas had 512k of ram. Both had much less processing power.
With 32mb you could probably run some kind of Linux.
Don't get me wrong. I like modern CPUs with huge caches and incredible power, but you do not need this for most devices. Also leads to lazy programming practices and calculators consuming hundreds of megabytes of RAM.
Imagine running an GPT-3 Generation model on a raspberry pi . This would be great