Source: https://mstdn.isometry.group/@Cahatstrophe2/117323121764942610
transcript
@[email protected]: you’ve heard of two factor authentication. you’re heard of three factor authentication. now get ready for just never being able to fucking log in at all
I miss my old 486 with DOS and Windows 3. No login, no updates, no subscriptions and collaboration only with actual physical friends coming over. New software from the computer market or pirated by sharing floppy discs on the schoolyard…
I’m nostalgic about my 486,but I don’t miss it. I had the 25 Mhz, MEGAHERTZ not GHz version and it was pretty damn slow. The upgrade to the 100Mhz chip was great but it wasn’t until multicore CPUs before I felt that computers got fast enough for me.
It all depends on what you want to do with it. I had plenty of great games and applications on my 486 DX4.
Also, nowadays you can swap out the old spinning rust with a BlueSCSI or PicoIDE and get much faster disk access.
I’m not saying I didn’t love it at the time. I had a great time with it (my favourite probably being Duke Nukem 3D multiplayer via direct phone call), I’m just not nostalgic for that machine. Advances just came so fast at that time.
I mean get Linux and don’t update?
Doesn’t give me the nostalgia feeling and is also multi user by design.
Still, it would be a fun weekend project, you can start with Linux, set up autologin, set dosbox to autostart on startup, you can even install Windows 3.
Or just for that nostalgia hit: https://archive.org/details/win3-1
Interesting idea
So … buy an old 486 and have fun with that, I guess. They still exist, though finding a working one could be pretty difficult and/or expensive these days.
You won’t get back that LAN only world of the past but in Linux and even Windows you can simply disable network adapters/controllers. Maybe if I ever have kids I’ll recreate a LAN only environment for them.