David Wright <[email protected]> writes: > No problem for a 1.5GHz 32-bit processor with 512MB memory. > BTW the term "plain x86" is almost meaningless. For a start, > are you talking about the processor, or the architecture? > Debian's "amd64" architecture is still an x86, just 64-bit.
Well, for one thing one should not rely on a mathematical coprocessor. It was optional (and not exactly cheap) with the 80386. And yes, I did run Linux (and previously UNIX) on an 80SX386, the 8-bit bus version of the 80386 processor, though mainly as a thin client to a full-fledged 80486 server with a whopping 16MB of RAM and a SCSI hard disk with over 100MB of capacity. I think we used Interactive UNIX and Coherent UNIX before converging on Linux when it became useable (which was a surprisingly short time after it became available first, something like 1 or 2 years). -- David Kastrup
