[jeffbee]

We used to serve serious traffic off 486 machines, so if anything it's probably a software issue. Perhaps FreeBSD/i386 would be an appropriate choice?

If you weren't there you probably don't realize that the 486 was a huge leap over the 386. We don't get 100% generational improvements these days. The 486 enjoyed a long life and its later incarnations were giving contemporaneous Pentium models a run for the money, and I'm not even counting socket-compatible upgrades from AMD and so forth. You could put 64MB RAM and big L2 caches and there were PCI motherboards in the later 486 years.

Consider that the AMD Geode was basically the last 486 standing, and it was (is) more than adequate for routing between or firewalling fast ethernet links, serving HTTP etc.

[smoppi]

My system is 100% 16-bit code and cannot access more than 640 kB of memory, and that's why it is so limited. I could probably increase the maximum amount of sockets and file handles to give it more capacity, but it still has its limits.

[randombits0]

The least you could do is EMS/XMS. Quick, somebody give this person a copy of DesqView/386! :)

[andrewf]

Firing up EMM386/JEMM386 underneath this environment, or writing 32-bit code, may go against the 8088 spirit of the project. A physical EMS card is an expensive pain to obtain, and you'd probably want to speak to its hardware directly rather than loading a DOS device driver, but it would be period-accurate :) There's old ones on eBay and modern replicas like https://texelec.com/product/lo-tech-ems-2-mb/

You can do virtual memory above the 256kb mark with the most advanced 80s cards but they're even rarer (I think DESQview worked best with this setup, and its what the 386+ software EMM implementations give you). For regular EMS which only works in a single 64kb region, disk caching and RAMdisk were common use cases, which didn't require rearchitecting the OS or applications to understand a new addressing scheme.

On 286+ you can also call a BIOS function to copy to/from extended memory, using only 8088 instructions in your own code, but of course the BIOS code will rely on newer processor instructions to make it happen. http://www.ctyme.com/intr/rb-1527.htm

Aside: cool project! I wrote a protected mode bootloader for old PCs recently and that was quite enough work!

[ForOldHack]

They probably rolled there own, omitting all the edge cases pertaining to a coagulated mess of spaghetti code.

[drzaiusapelord]

Yep this! People would regularly run windows 95 on a 486 with 8-16mb of ram. This was their daily driver which did word, dial up/aol/prodigy, messaging, games, etc. I think the reaction here that someone is able to run a little web server off of it is perhaps a bit overdone. Yes, its impressive he wrote his own stack, but the hardware itself is still beefy.

[smoppi]

Yeah, a 486 is not a slow CPU - not even the 25 MHz SX version that the server has. But Windows 95 is a 32-bit protected mode OS. My OS also works on a 8088, but I don't have a 8088 computer that I could use as a server.

[prirun]

I paid $8700 for a tower 25MHz 486 back in the day. Sheesh!

[hdjjhhvvhga]

Yeah, I remember the times where 486 servers were quite normal. On the other hand, most users were on dialup and unlikely to cause serious trouble.