I have installed using CF cards to IDE as hard drives (less noisy and much faster) DrDos 7.03 with ansiplus , 4dos , ftp server, Doug menu. Really fun with "fast" 486 can browse with Arachne sending and recieving  files to on my linux mint laptop

That's quite cool. I wish I'd kept some of my older hardware with older versions of Windows on, mostly just for retro gaming but also because I want to play around with Vue D'Esprit renderer again and its 16-bit only, which means I have to faff around with VirtualBox and old images.

My most recent cool purchase was a powered SATA/IDE to USB cable, which worked just fine to boot up and read an old Fujitsu 20GB IDE drive

sounds fun,I have one of those so I can get to my old
HDDs for the 486 I have several CFs that I can have
two at the time and swop from outside the computers
bakside. I have widows 95 with Lite Step shell,DrDos,
DSL (Damn small linux) and now I have started a freeDos installation, which
takes some learning.
I am posting this with Arachne on the 486

I f you have old pc stuff especially IBM  86-92, floppies, drives, books etc. keep it, I have sold for about £1800 on swedish "ebay" Tradera.

That's incredible. It's amazing how much some of the hardware is worth now if its in very good condition.

A good IBM kbrd model M goes for 100-200 £s (I sold one ) I have an even older in good condition, a model F which I will keep for a while as I tinker with my IBMs  5150 and 5160 before I sell them.

Now posting using Arachne in FreeDos on IBM 486 DX100

What monitor and resolution are you using?

Viewsonic LCD  800x600 but 1024x768 also works but a bit slower. Does not look great but workable really slow though   Only fast thing is reading news with Microweb (a text only browser,works on 8086 and up)

I tried Lynx (text  based with colors) works much faster and I could log etc. in to tekforums (Much faser)

I would imagine text based browsers must really struggle with the modern web, aren't most sites almost unreadable, or does it rely on accessibility components like a screen reader?

Well lynx does not seem to struggle with tekforums at least arachne much slower but show gifs and pics.

Now getting a bit more familliar with FreeDos it is quite good Now posting from DilloDos browser on the 486 seems faster than Arachne and things looks better

Turned off pic loading when posting incresed speed quite a bit and still showed pics in cache it seems

Quote from: bear on October 17, 2021, 20:31:30 PM
Now getting a bit more familliar with FreeDos it is quite good Now posting from DilloDos browser on the 486 seems faster than Arachne and things looks better

I very nearly mispronounced that