i286 compatable OS?

[Joe]

Know of any? Basically I need a command line with a text editor.

[MyndFyre]

FreeDOS.

BTW, they weren't called i286s, I don't think.  The ix86 nomenclature was around for the 386 and was used heavily in the 486 because that's when the AMD/Cyrix/intel chip wars really began to kick off.  They were usually just called 286s or 80286s.

[Newby]

I saw an iAPX 286 chip in my dad's office once. :O

Couldn't the 286 only do 2mb of RAM? WTF are you doing with such a junker, Joe?

[Joe]

I saw an iAPX 286 chip in my dad's office once. :O

Couldn't the 286 only do 2mb of RAM? WTF are you doing with such a junker, Joe?

Do I need to take a picture of my laptop? It's a Compaq LTE 286 with a screen something like 4x8 inches. It sucks, hardcore. I was just wondering if the bitch even worked. =p

EDIT -
If you want a junker, check out my PowerBook 160. It's falling apart from old age, literally.

EDIT -
Found a decent set of pictures of the model.
http://www.overclockers.com/articles1171/

[Joe]

What to buy.. what to buy? An 80 dollar Compaq battery or a bunch of D-cells that work just as good? Hm. I'm going to have to go for the latter!

To bad all my D-cell's are dead. I know I can power it, though, because it lights up for a second.

[iago]

You won't find many OSes that work on a 16-bit CPU. 

[MyndFyre]

I saw an iAPX 286 chip in my dad's office once. :O

Couldn't the 286 only do 2mb of RAM? WTF are you doing with such a junker, Joe?

286s could do up to 16mb of RAM, but only in protected mode, and in order to get back to real mode you had to reset the processor.  Woot!

[deadly7]

LMAO.  Wow.  I'd scavenge any useful parts and use them as bookmarks (see: RAM/PCI[they didn't have PCI, I don't know what port they used though] cards)

[Warrior]

I saw an iAPX 286 chip in my dad's office once. :O

Couldn't the 286 only do 2mb of RAM? WTF are you doing with such a junker, Joe?

286s could do up to 16mb of RAM, but only in protected mode, and in order to get back to real mode you had to reset the processor.  Woot!

Reset as in a soft reset..aha I tried doing that once in Optimix I gave up though. BIOS expects too many things in special locations.

[MyndFyre]

LMAO.  Wow.  I'd scavenge any useful parts and use them as bookmarks (see: RAM/PCI[they didn't have PCI, I don't know what port they used though] cards)

ISA (Industry Standards Architecture).  No Plug-n-Play, and slow as hell.

[Joe]

@MyndFyre: After taking a look at FreeDOS, I saw that it ships as an ISO? This box has a 40MB HD and no CD drive, so unless I'm totally mistaken there's no way FreeDOS would ever work on it. However, I guess I totally blew off MS-DOS 6.x + Windows 3.x.

[Newby]

Floppy image?

[MyndFyre]

Floppy image?

Yeah I don't have floppy images of those.

[Joe]

I have actually floppies of those laying around. =)

[MyndFyre]

I have actually floppies of those laying around. =)

image and upload them!

[deadly7]

wtf would be the point of making an image of something that's like 2mb big.

[Joe]

Are you stupid deadly? <3

Phone lines, or even cable lines, have quite a hard time of transfering physical disks across them. If you're going to send someone a floppy disk over the internet, you're going to either need a slingshot (and drivers for it), or a disk image.

[MyndFyre]

wtf would be the point of making an image of something that's like 2mb big.

I have DOS 6.0 and 6.22 floppies here, but they're so old they're badly degraded.  I would love to get my hands on floppy images so that I can have them around permanently.  Apparently so are my Windows 3.1 disks.  I know one of my (29) Windows 95 disks is bad, but I've imaged all of them and I can install with them.

I like to use DOS for VMs; I'd use FreeDOS, but it's not 100% binary compatible yet (as my tests have shown with ATAPICDD.SYS).  But running things like the SimCity Terrain Editor in a DOS box through Windows XP doesn't work (characters get nuts); I had to run it through my VM to get it to look right.