Pocket 386 supports external accessories and will just barely run Windows 95.
What is their intended market? I see no real use for such a box. Heck, even Linux will probably come to a crawl on that box. And you can probably build something ARM based for the same price with eight gigabytes of RAM and running circles around the 386.
The first two ads I see under the article are for hearing aids, which probably describes the target market for this thing.
Out of curiosity, what’s the utility in this? Is it meant to be a toy of sorts?
I’ve got a 486SX industrial PC that I refurbed. Much fun!
But you can hardly expand this thing at all. And there’s a hella dividing line between a 386 and any given 486. I got mine loaded with 128MB, USB floppy emulator (a MUST have) and an SSD (through adapters). You just can’t do that with this animal, can’t even add a math coprocessor.
I’d give $20 to have one to play with, that’s it.
Running anything on a 386 was NOT fun. I don’t think I’d pay $200 for the privilege of hating it all over again.
At the same time, it forced me to learn. Nowadays, every game and app you’d want is a few clicks away, and most likely it’ll just work without having to think about IRQ settings or COM ports or whether there’s enough space on your 50 MB hard disk.
Yeah, but they should have gone with a 486DX, or SX at least. HUGE difference. The 386 was just too damned frustrating, but it was the first work PC I ever laid hands on. For a personal computer, I upgraded from a 286 to a Pentium 200.
Couldn’t this be done with an FPGA?
Yeah. There’s the ao486 core available on MiSTer.
There’s also the PCem (as well as forks 86Box and PCBox) software emulators which are excellent ways of emulating old PCs.
But emulation (regardless of whether hardware or software) is not the same experience as real hardware, especially when it comes to PCs. There is the tinkering with hardware, the process of building the PC, the satisfying click of the power button and turbo button, using floppy disks, trying to get it online, etc.
