Minix on a 286 “Laptop”

I was recently privileged enough to get to play with my friend Will's newest toy, an ancient 286 laptop that weighs about 20lbs, and had a little amber 8-inch screen. It basically had the form factor of an Apple ][ computer but with an LCD panel stuck on top.

As far as I know it didn't have a battery, and instead of a DC power adapter, it had a regular three-prong AC cable going into it. There was even enough room in the back to have standard ISA slots, into which was placed an ethernet card, of course.

Now, if all this wasn't cool enough, when I turned the thing on I didn't see the usual "Starting MS-DOS" screen, instead I got the Minix boot-up messages. I'd never actually run Minix before so this was quite a treat. In the days where Linux desktop environments are getting more bloated than even Microsoft Windows it was refreshing to see a Unix system fit comfortably in 1MB of RAM.

With that and an ethernet card you would have a pretty nice terminal for running console apps off of a Linux server tucked away somewhere in a back room.

The best part of the night was when I discovered that it had the original advent text adventure game on there. I nearly lost my shit when I saw that in the /usr/bin directory. Just going on my memory of the game from playing it obsessively when I was 12 on my own 286 laptop, I was able to get right to the "you are in a maze of twisting caves, all alike" part in about 10 minutes. Poor Sabrina and Justin had no idea what the fuss was about, but I was in geek heaven.