I did the same thing with an AM5x86-133 based industrial computer (the SoC is an AMD Elan SC520) with 32 MiB of RAM. I found it actually quite painful to get a kernel config together that wouldn't OOM the system at boot (for the current upstream kernel). I just barely squeaked by with all of the cgroup and netfilter options OpenRC requires, the ethernet driver, and the legacy ISA IDE driver. I should probably change the optimization settings to -Os rather than -O2 though. I ended up starting with tinyconfig and working forward from there.

I actually have two of them (from different vendors) with the same SoC. One has 32 MiB of RAM soldered on that I can't upgrade (a Kontron board), the other has a SO-DIMM slot (a WinSystems board). So $5 and some eBay sleuthing brought it to 128 MiB. As for the former, I don't have schematics, so I'm a little uncomfortable just soldering another SDRAM chip to it and seeing what happens.

Only thing I was a bit sad about was that I spent the time figuring out how to change the CHOST on Gentoo to i586, only to discover that the AM5x86 is a 486 based core...

I remember when I had an AMD 5x86-133 (branded like a AM486-DX5 133) as my computer... these times playing DooM 2 and the demo of Star Fleet Academy at slow motion...

OpenWRT for 486 would be a faster choice. Just crosscompile pkgs from another machine.

You'll have http and gopher support granted. If libressl compile and run, place it under /opt, and maybe you'll be able to compile a gemini client.

I should give that a go, yeah. The gentoo attempt was mostly to see how a modern desktop class linux distro would work on a system that old. Answer: Not very fast!

OpenWRT with musl would run much faster. Try to build a slim kernel with the OpenWRT toolchain.

Always funny to compare the amount of RAM in these machines to modern L3 cache sizes. You can get an AMD chip with 8X as much!

Same with storage. This laptop has a few times more RAM than my first PC had disk space. And in turn, I've used servers that had more RAM than my laptop today has SSD space.

As you get older, the differences just becomes larger and larger. At some point it just gets ridiculous. My current laptop has almost 1 million times more RAM than my first computer (40 GB vs. 64 kB).

It's just impossible to compare the numbers when the differences are that large.

And of course, a post like this is not complete without me noting that the response times when pressing a button on the keyboard was vastly faster on my C64 than my modern machine.

> And of course, a post like this is not complete without me noting that the response times when pressing a button on the keyboard was vastly faster on my C64 than my modern machine.

Related - the analysis on input latencies by Dan Luu https://danluu.com/input-lag/

No numbers are given for the C64, but the timing for the CBM4016 (with quite similar firmware/BASIC) should be similar. The Apple 2 input latency is even lower. Perhaps this is related to the fact that the Apple 2 firmware didn't use interrupts and polling might have been more efficient in this case.

My first Linux install was a big pile of 3.5" floppies downloaded over my (well, my parents) 9600 bps modem containing Slackware that I installed to a 486dx2-66 with 8 MB RAM. With that 8 MB I was even able to run Xfree86 and an xterm before it started swapping!

That was the time before PnP ISA and kernel modules, so to get the sound blaster card to work one had to specify the IRQ (and I/O port address?) in the kernel config and recompile the kernel. Good times!

Urxvt would haven been (and it's still is) much lighter than XTerm.