A single upvote doesn’t convey how much I enjoyed this article. It warms my heart to see ancient computers still being used productively. Thanks for sharing!
This post brought back some great memories! My first laptop was a gift from my dad. I was about to study abroad and didn’t have a computer at the time (back then, laptops were still a rarity). My dad generously gave me his computer, a Compaq Armada 1125, along with two PCMCIA cards: one for Ethernet and the other for dial-up modem connectivity.
In my second year (2000–2001), I bought a desktop and started experimenting with Linux. I tried to install every UNIX-like system I could get my hands on using floppy disks. The only one that booted seamlessly, recognizing the hardware right away, was NetBSD. Even the PCMCIA cards were instantly supported. To connect to the internet, I had to use the cu command line app for dial-up access.
With limited hard drive space, I didn’t bother installing a window manager. For a while, the laptop functioned as a simple FTP or SMTP server. Eventually, it became unusable. I wish I still had it - I’d love to set up an old version of NetBSD on it again, just for nostalgia and fun.
Thank you for writing that and posting it. I have no notes. It was a thoroughly enjoyable read.
On a less flippant note, I would cheerfully pay something like $500 for a chonky modern version of the 380Z with a great keyboard built around a raspberry pi and an OK screen with enough battery life for a day.
I’ve been ogling the Reform for about 3 years now. One of the RK3588 configurations would be excellent. Unfortunately, by the time I put wifi and the lowest-end RK3588 configuration in it, I’ve tripled my price.
I don’t consider that an outright unreasonable price for such a nice, niche, open rig from a tiny company. But it is expensive enough that I would need it to be my primary computer, and I don’t think it’s quite up to that yet. I’d have to test it a bit first, at a minimum, to find out.
Damn, pure nostalgia, thanks for sharing luke! My first laptop was a 380XD, unfortunately only had chance to run OpenBSD later on my 560E, perfect using 3com pcmcia cards, 56k modem and ethernet, I wish I had had the 560X model, or the thinner version of 380 with the same 233Mhz (or 300Mhz ebay) processor, video card and audio controller.
I’m pretty sure I had a 380-series, probably an XD, but that’s one of those things you think you’ll never forget and then one day you do. I’d forgotten just how thick it was until that pic at the top of the article brought it rushing back!
The GPU on 380Z is a NeoMagic MagicMedia 256AV and it has a dedicated driver in Xorg, called neomagic. However, only in NetBSD it worked out of the box without any tinkering, just by running startx. On other systems I tried, it required some adjustments or even resorting to plain VESA/FB drivers.
I was under the impression that Xorg removed a bunch of old video drivers due to tech debt and trying to modernize with Mesa. Cool to hear that NetBSD didn’t remove it.
This is very nice. My oldest child is approaching the age where they might be able to learn to use a computer, and I’m really tempted to hold off at least until they know how to read and write, and then start them off on the most basic setup of a BSD kind. I only have experience with FreeBSD and OpenBSD, but this article convinced me it’s worth considering also NetBSD.
Reading this has reinvigorated me to try and make systems like that exist in more than just NetBSD land. I actually love NetBSD and used to daily drive it, but I want there to be more options. So, thanks for the inspiration :)
One minor issue is that the BIOS-reported size is limited to 8GB. It doesn’t matter to operating systems, but confuses some bootloaders. In general it’s safer to use a smaller root partition and a separate one for /home. However, NetBSD worked just fine off a single full-disk partition.
Does NetBSD have a SPL (secondary program loader) or similar? As long as that is within the first 8GB, it should be fine. However, if an upgrade to that program moves the blocks on the filesystem beyond the first 8GB, then the BIOS won’t be able to load it into memory.
Still, it is safer to just have the boot or root filesystem be less than 8GB.
Certain platforms use two levels of bootloaders, so yes, you can have drives and partitions of any size if you just make a small partition at the beginning of the disk that has the second level bootloader.
This also makes it easy to have your root on external USB, on RAID, or anything else. For instance, it’s trivial to boot off of an SD card on a Pi of many sorts and root on USB or NVMe.
One particularly “confused” bootloader was the one of FreeBSD. It refused to even show the boot menu, failing with “bad superblock”, if the boot partition was >8GB.
I’m not sure if it was due to some extra safety checks or maybe sth specific to FreeBSD’s implementation of UFS2. Interestingly, with 2 partitions it worked, but still dumped a couple of screens of warnings.
A single upvote doesn’t convey how much I enjoyed this article. It warms my heart to see ancient computers still being used productively. Thanks for sharing!
This post brought back some great memories! My first laptop was a gift from my dad. I was about to study abroad and didn’t have a computer at the time (back then, laptops were still a rarity). My dad generously gave me his computer, a Compaq Armada 1125, along with two PCMCIA cards: one for Ethernet and the other for dial-up modem connectivity.
In my second year (2000–2001), I bought a desktop and started experimenting with Linux. I tried to install every UNIX-like system I could get my hands on using floppy disks. The only one that booted seamlessly, recognizing the hardware right away, was NetBSD. Even the PCMCIA cards were instantly supported. To connect to the internet, I had to use the
cucommand line app for dial-up access.With limited hard drive space, I didn’t bother installing a window manager. For a while, the laptop functioned as a simple FTP or SMTP server. Eventually, it became unusable. I wish I still had it - I’d love to set up an old version of NetBSD on it again, just for nostalgia and fun.
Thank you for writing that and posting it. I have no notes. It was a thoroughly enjoyable read.
On a less flippant note, I would cheerfully pay something like $500 for a chonky modern version of the 380Z with a great keyboard built around a raspberry pi and an OK screen with enough battery life for a day.
There’s the MNT Reform but it’s more expensive than your target price.
I’ve been ogling the Reform for about 3 years now. One of the RK3588 configurations would be excellent. Unfortunately, by the time I put wifi and the lowest-end RK3588 configuration in it, I’ve tripled my price.
I don’t consider that an outright unreasonable price for such a nice, niche, open rig from a tiny company. But it is expensive enough that I would need it to be my primary computer, and I don’t think it’s quite up to that yet. I’d have to test it a bit first, at a minimum, to find out.
Damn, pure nostalgia, thanks for sharing luke! My first laptop was a 380XD, unfortunately only had chance to run OpenBSD later on my 560E, perfect using 3com pcmcia cards, 56k modem and ethernet, I wish I had had the 560X model, or the thinner version of 380 with the same 233Mhz (or 300Mhz ebay) processor, video card and audio controller.
I’m pretty sure I had a 380-series, probably an XD, but that’s one of those things you think you’ll never forget and then one day you do. I’d forgotten just how thick it was until that pic at the top of the article brought it rushing back!
I was under the impression that Xorg removed a bunch of old video drivers due to tech debt and trying to modernize with Mesa. Cool to hear that NetBSD didn’t remove it.
I’d never even heard about CardBus, but then again I’ve never owned a laptop that was built before 2002ish. Nice.
This is very nice. My oldest child is approaching the age where they might be able to learn to use a computer, and I’m really tempted to hold off at least until they know how to read and write, and then start them off on the most basic setup of a BSD kind. I only have experience with FreeBSD and OpenBSD, but this article convinced me it’s worth considering also NetBSD.
Reading this has reinvigorated me to try and make systems like that exist in more than just NetBSD land. I actually love NetBSD and used to daily drive it, but I want there to be more options. So, thanks for the inspiration :)
Does NetBSD have a SPL (secondary program loader) or similar? As long as that is within the first 8GB, it should be fine. However, if an upgrade to that program moves the blocks on the filesystem beyond the first 8GB, then the BIOS won’t be able to load it into memory.
Still, it is safer to just have the boot or root filesystem be less than 8GB.
Certain platforms use two levels of bootloaders, so yes, you can have drives and partitions of any size if you just make a small partition at the beginning of the disk that has the second level bootloader.
This also makes it easy to have your root on external USB, on RAID, or anything else. For instance, it’s trivial to boot off of an SD card on a Pi of many sorts and root on USB or NVMe.
Yes and yeah, that’s what I figured…
One particularly “confused” bootloader was the one of FreeBSD. It refused to even show the boot menu, failing with “bad superblock”, if the boot partition was >8GB.
I’m not sure if it was due to some extra safety checks or maybe sth specific to FreeBSD’s implementation of UFS2. Interestingly, with 2 partitions it worked, but still dumped a couple of screens of warnings.