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I remember running geoworks on an 8086 with 1MB of ram. ran reasonably well and came with the proto AOL (for some reason I thought it came with a Quantum Link client that looked like an AOL client, but according to wikipedia Quantum Link was already renamed to AOL at this time).

It was a pretty amazing piece of code that made that 8086 very usable for a few more years.



Yea, the DOS AOL client looked like Windows 3.1 but it ran so much faster on my 386/16


Out of curiosity, what kind of a machine was that? I didn't think you could get that much ram in an 8086 ...


It was a panasonic of some sort. Don't remember the details that clearly. Remember the turbo button, and I remember being upset that Wolfenstein 3D required a 286 and wouldn't run on it. I'm also positive it came with more than 640k of ram, as would go through the tricks to load things in the upper portion to have more "normal" ram for games and the like.


I’m surprised that it came with a turbo button; those were a hack to downclock the bus to a lower speed to get old software that had assumed a specific clock speed to work correctly. Would be unusual on an 8086.


Some of them just enabled/disabled the cache to achieve slowdown; the 7-segment display on the front of the case was all a ruse! A set of jumpers controlled what value to show depending on the state of the switch.


lots of 8088/8086 "turbo xt"s had their CPU run at 8-10mhz vs 4.77mhz for the original IBM PC & XT.


Yup, I had an 8Mhz Hyundai XT clone with the same "feature".





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