I don’t have a 486. I don’t know anyone who has a 486. I wouldn’t know what to do with a 486. I know full well that all versions before 7.1 will be fully usable forever and that someone would fork the kernel if they actually needed to run modern Linux on a 486.
And still this makes me a little bit sad and angry.
I still have a 486-SX 25 in my basement, it was my main Computer in the early 90s and I have fond memories of playing DOS games like Monkey Island 2 and Day of the Tentacle on it.
I think the main impact here is that there are plenty of embedded system-on-a-chip sort of things specifically designed for industrial applications not only still out there in the world, but still being actively manufactured that are based on the 486 architecture.
For retro gaming nerds, their 486 machines would all be running some variant of DOS anyway.
How many of those are getting continuously updated to the latest mainline kernel though?
Twelve
I believe you.
Absolutely none of them.
Source: some tools that are a part of my job run these kinds of machines
It’s time to put grandpa to rest.
More like great great great grandpa, realistically. I think it’s absolutely commendable that anyone has maintained compatibility with it for this long. Expected? Hell no. Deserved? Arguable on either side. But mighty damn admirable that the effort was made.
The speed of tech in many sectors tends to just blast away and leave everything behind and say screw it, keep up of fuck off. The classic desktop architecture seems to be where they’ve held off of that mentality the longest and with most integrity.
goodnight sweet prince 🙏
