[Rule-list] About RH 8 not supporting 486

[Geoff Burling]

On Mon, 21 Oct 2002, Colin Mattoon wrote:

> I think Mr. Fioretti summed this up perfectly, but there is one
> additional nagging concern that I have.

[snipping for brevity]
>
> The focus is on the deprecation of the i386 and i486 processors. And
> that's pretty much a "done deal." Less obvious is that a very high
> percentage of i586 machines are also now off limits to Red Hat users.
> Most of the used Pentium 1 machines I find are equipped with between 8
> and 32 MB RAM. Adding RAM is certainly an option for some, but the
> fact is that it is increasingly difficult to find 72 pin memory -- and
> when you find it -- it is considerably more expensive per megabyte
> than 168 pin SDRAM. Locally, I have found it impossible to purchase
> anything less than pairs of new 64 MB EDO RAM, unless one wants to
> scavenge a few used 8 MB FP chips. I don't think very many people in
> North America will opt to spend $100 USD (or more) for RAM to exercise
> the privilege of installing Red Hat 8.0 on a Pentium 1 75 Mhz machine,
> when they can buy a replacement with an 800 Mhz processor from
> Walmart.com for $200.00 USD.
>
Yes, older hardware is a drug on the market. A local non-profit group,
FreeGeek, now will not accept donations of hardware below an i586 200Mhz
with 64 MB of RAM. On the other hand, these older machine are free for
the taking & offer an inexpensive way to learn thru destructive
experimentation, so by this measure RULE is still of some value.

On the other hand, now that these older architectures have been deprecated,
could there be a market for inexpensive, special-purpose devices based
on these technologies? Before all of you laugh off this suggestion,
remember that the Palm OS handheld devices used a processor from the
68xxx family -- an architecture that Apple had abandoned several years
before.

Even if there is small chance that some entrepreneur decides to
embrace this ``advance to the past", RULE will be useful again by keeping
technological simplicity viable.

Just my two cents.

Geoff



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