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Finally Got A 386 Back Up And Running

W

Windows2000

Experienced Member
Joined
Dec 3, 2012
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55
Location
Kansas, United States
Last year a family friend was clearing out his basement and gave me a DFI 386/33 workstation with a 1.2GB Micropolis hard drive, magnetic tape drive, one 5.25 floppy drive and a 3.5 floppy drive. After fixing it up I swapped out the original hard drive for another smaller working drive with MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 on it then upgraded it to 4MB of extended memory.

Now that is it working, I am curious on what I can do with it. I'm debating if I want to keep the Windows 3.1 vanilla install or try another OS for the fun of it. If I do what can I achieve on an Intel 386/33 with 4MB of RAM?
 
You could probably run OS/2 2.0 on it. I tried OS/2 on an IBM Model 56 and it ran fine, but I couldn't see the appeal of it. It was far clunkier than Windows.

UNIX would work too. A quick Google suggests "MuLinux" was built for older (386 and up) processors and there are likely others.

33MHz with 4MB of RAM will run a great deal of the games made in that era and probably Borland C++ 4.5 if that's your thing.
 
Bump the RAM a bit and you'll be fine running Win95. Win95 says that it can run in 4MB, but I wouldn't recommend it.

You could also try WFWG 3.11.
 
Heh, I remember 'walking' (as opposed to 'running') Win95 on a 386SX/16 with 5MB; a DX 33 with 8 or more should work fairly well for modest things. After all, there's really not much difference between WfW 3.11 and Win95 under the hood (same 386 VMM; see 'Unauthorized Windows 95' by Andrew Schulman for details of just how close those two are).
 
98, a 486 definitely, but I've run 95B (with an 8GB SCSI drive) on a 20MHz 386 with 13MB for years. Browsing, of course, not so hot. Otherwise, not too bad and your selection of 32-bit capability is a bit larger than Win 3.1, which supports only Win32S-type programs.

Besides it's all DOS underneath.
 
With Windows 95 the big memory hog is networking. Without networking it can boot and run small applications fine in 4 megs of ram, with 8-12 making it really happy. With networking loaded, don't even try 4 megs or it will slowly crash and burn. 12 megs minimum. More depending on what programs you try to run. And a large permanent swap file is a must with small amounts of RAM.
 
I ran Win 95 better on my 386 DX33 with 5MB than my friend did on his 486 SX25 with 4MB, so I wouldn't say a 486 is necessarily going to be faster ;) CPU isn't everything.
My system had an edge with SCSI disk, and the extra 1MB of RAM (and faster bus speed) though, but it's doable and can run half way decent on a fast 386 DX. Though it was night and day difference when I upgraded to a 486 DX4-100 with 16MB RAM ;)
 
Warp 3 is certainly possible--I've done it. The bigger question is how useful it would be. The Windows compatibility isn't particularly wonderful and the body of available OS/2 software is dwarfed by that of MSFT Windows.
 
Took these about an hour ago. The first one is of the processor and co-processor but it's kinda blurry, sorry about that.

The next two are of the machine itself. When setting up the 3.5" hard disk, I tried to fit it in the space that the original behemoth of a hard disk (Shown in the last image with size comparison to a 3.5" HDD) had occupied. I am trusting two UTS screws to secure it in place and so far it is doing well.

If I wasn't constrained with time (finals coming up, need to study, study, study...) I would have hooked it up to show a demo of what the previous owner left behind on that hard disk. Maybe sometime later though.
 

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Good luck with your study.

OS/2 would be quite sluggish compared to Dos/windows 3.1x/Wfw 3.11. You could give Basic Linux a shot http://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/ . And there's Xenix. Getting more ram would help things out quite a bit though. In reality runnining either Windows 95 or Warp 3 in anything less than 16 megs of ram in just plain silly. The author of MuLinux had single floppy distro called Lipton http://ftp.gwdg.de/linux/mulinux/lepton.html

Have fun.
 
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Impressive tower case! Can you upgrade the memory any more? 4 MB is ok with Windows 3.1 but, realistically, you do need more for Windows for Workgroups 3.11. I have a 40 mhz AMD 386 running with 32 MB of RAM, and WFW runs well, plus it's good to have it accessible to the Home LAN. My own 2 cents is stay away from Windows 95 with that setup. Even on my 486 Gateway, it's not really peppy. If there was a source for PC-MOS, that would be an ideal system. Are you running a monochrome monitor on it?
 
That's not an FPU, it's an i385 cache controller (though there is a socket for an FPU). Do you have a better shot of the motherboard?

I wouldn't bother with Windows 95. I remember "upgrading" from WFW311 to Windows 95 quite vividly. It was much slower. 8MB is not really enough if you're running programs. I would say the absolute minimum you want is a DX2-66 with 16MB.
 
Anonymous Coward said:
That's not an FPU, it's an i385 cache controller (though there is a socket for an FPU). Do you have a better shot of the motherboard?

I wouldn't bother with Windows 95. I remember "upgrading" from WFW311 to Windows 95 quite vividly. It was much slower. 8MB is not really enough if you're running programs. I would say the absolute minimum you want is a DX2-66 with 16MB.
Click to expand...

Ah yes you're right.
And yeah I'd save Warp and 95 for Pentium machines.
 
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