I found even a Vaxstation 3100 with the m42 cpu and 12MB of RAM was enough to work with. Sometime within the last five years, I installed NetBSD by netbooting from a Linux mopd server (because I didn't have a working 512-byte block SCSI cdrom). As a computer, it was quite reasonably usable. Not fast by any means. I didn't have anything but a serial console to work with, so no gui. I thought the best thing in the world would have been to browse the Internet on the machine, but I gave up on it because I couldn't Lynx to work.

All of this seems under-powered today, but was actually more horsepower than a comparable PC capable of running Windows 95.

If you ever want to put VMS on that VAXstation 3100 m42, it's pretty neat to play around with. DEC people were sharp, like the Bell Labs and Berkeley people, and did a lot of things differently than Unix did. VMS was perhaps less agile, but more consistent. If you can get hold of VAX C for it, you might be amused to find that some of the documentation for system libraries has examples in BLISS instead.

BTW, don't underestimate an old workstation with only 12MB of RAM: they were often used for technical software that today people might write to require machines with 100x that much RAM.

(I did a little work on the VAXstation, for technical software. I also kludged up a gateway to one, from a TCP/IP LAN, through an Ultrix box that was also on DECnet, since no one had paid for a TCP/IP stack. A lot of important software was optional, little was free, and the printed manuals you could find were precious.)

I fully intend to do so. I have the VAX VMS ISO and hobbyist license around somewhere and have spent a little time fooling with it under emulation. I first used it nearly 30 years ago, and have been missing versioning filesystems ever since. For all of the strengths of Unix-like systems, notably their longevity and versatility, as I think I've written elsewhere on this forum, VMS just seems so much more fully engineered, designed and deliberate in contrast.

(It seems you had a great hack to get VMS connected. Was that used for file sharing only, or could you do more with it?)

.iso is perfect -- TK50 drives are scary in how they operate, and I'd be scared to put a rare tape into one.

I gatewayed remote logins from arbitrary hosts, and I probably used a stock DECnet facility to transfer/share files between a VAX/VMS and Ultrix MIPS box, possibly direct to NFS volume mounted from a SPARCserver onto Ultrix. I think there was at least one NFS implementation (TGV?) for VMS at the time, but didn't have it.

My apprenticeship life in the 1980s was full of TS11 and TK50 goodness - I looked after an 11/750 and a couple of MicroVAXes all running VMS.

I have this bucket list idea of getting the lowest-powered chip I can find that's still fast enough to give me a nice little *nix environment in which I can use Vim, Tmux, and also SSH into things, then sticking it into a laptop shell and filling the rest of the space with batteries.

I wonder if one could achieve like a month of battery life for such a glorified typewriter/thin client.

On a recent project I played around with some SoCs that could do something like this.

I wound up using a Renesas RZ/A1L, it's an ARM-A9 core with 3MB of SRAM on the die. You attach it to an inexpensive quad-lane SPI NOR flash part and it will boot Linux with just those two parts. The flash serves as a filesystem and I believe you can also XIP the kernel off the NOR part if you choose.

We even ran Qt on it with an XGA LCD and it was poky but it worked. It could probably do what you're looking to do.

https://www.renesas.com/us/en/doc/products/mpumcu/doc/rz/r01...

That's probably the lowest-end part I'd say would work for something like this. You can run Linux off a cheaper Cortex-M with some amount of work, but it's not pleasant. The iMXRT1050 does look interesting, though.

https://www.emcraft.com/imxrt1050-evk-board

Stack batteries on the back of a jailbroken Kindle 3G running Debian? Not sure how far you'll get with power management on it. Or using it.

Just curious, what would you use vim for on a device like that? Presumably it won’t be able to do much beyond what you outlined so unless you plan on using it as just a not taking device/typewriter, why not just have an embedded ssh client with tmux?

Pretty much just what you said - when offline, it's just a fancy typewriter that I can also run a simple shell script or two on.

I guess it also needs an e-ink screen, otherwise the screen would still draw a lot of the power.

How fast are eInk displays nowadays? Like what kind of refresh rate are we looking at?

Not much more than a few Hertz, AFAICT. It should be enough to use a terminal - someone even installed X and ran XFCE on a Kindle, but it looks pretty weird.

They actually run X by default. They use the Awesome window manager.

I've been messing around with an Arduino this week to make my own IoT device. It has enough power to negotiate a https connection, so presumably it could run SSH and Vim. I think they are very efficient in terms of power usage.

There's the Vocore2. Five volts, 74ma draw when idle. https://vocore.io/v2.html

No video though.