My recollection is they had to put some fixes in for 486 support on real hardware a couple years ago because someone discovered it only actually worked on emulators (maybe just qemu) which wasn't quite matching real hardware.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/10/...

I have a high-end 486 motherboard with four 72-pin SIMM slots and PCI slots that accepts up to 192MB of RAM. For some reason it can't handle four 64MB SIMMs so it won't do 256MB, but it'll handle three fine. Or one 128MB and one 64MB one. But adding anything more makes it not boot and it seems to be a chipset limitation. At one point a couple years ago I had it maxxed out at that complete with an AMD 5x86 120mhz, PCI USB, video, and sound cards and Windows 98 and it did work but... other than for funsies there's no real point. I could have installed modern Linux on it but again, not something I really need to do or would miss not being able to do.

I think it would have probably managed Windows 2000 for fun, but again, not really. It's just a toy at this point and I don't see a use a case for it. I think there are some embedded cores based on the 486 instruction set like the Vortex86, but I believe the current ones have implemented enough (or maybe even the complete) Pentium instructions to run more modern stuff. And nobody probably needs to continue running the latest, current updates either given they're embedded systems.

That was six years ago and in many places the actual lockdown/remote learning was a year or less. It also goes way back before 2020. COVID may have impacted a small number of kids a specific age for a time but that was a long time ago now and kids have had plenty of time to adjust back to regular school.

It took awhile for things to catch up after the death of Flash, but there are still whole websites out there with bunches of little games that specifically advertise themselves as bypassing school blocking and being able to be used on school devices. I used to have a friend who was IT admin of a small school system and it was always a cat and mouse game trying to block all that. If they give kids access to the web at all in a way that isn't specifically allowlisted then they're going to find a way around stuff.

I semi-single-handedly caused half my high school AP Calc class to fail. We had TI-82s issued and I figured out getting Tetris, Solitaire, and a surprisingly capable Mario-esque game on mine and gave them to a couple friends. I didn't anticipate them figuring out how to transfer them to others because on a TI-82 it was a little trickier than later ones, but pretty soon most of the class had them. The teacher was a wonderful older woman who just didn't really understand technology at all and I have a distinct memory of one of the vice principals stopping by class just as part of wandering around and the teacher saying something like "They're always so diligently working on their calculators!"

It didn't take long for grades to tank and issues to crop up, and within a couple years of that the teachers learned to force students to wipe the calcs every couple days and keep an eye out for obvious off-label uses.

Old hard drives, which a lot of old timers like myself would remember, were indeed made with Iron Oxide. It wasn't quite rust but close enough to earn the moniker.

Granted they haven't been made with that in ages but the name hangs on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I remember reading a review back in the day about either the public beta or one of the first releases wondering why it was a picture of a hard drive in the first place. They mentioned that the average user has no idea what a hard drive is or what it looks like, compared to classic Mac OS's icon that resembled an external hard drive which made some sense given the SCSI legacy of it, so wondered why they chose that when everything else was so skeuomorphic.

I'm even more surprised they still stick with "Macintosh HD" as the title even when they've pivoted away from "Macintosh" as a brand (and even "Mac" for awhile) and it hasn't been an HD in forever. That even predates Mac OS X.

This is missing that all the early consoles had major price drops during their lives, and most of the sales happened after those price drops. Relatively few people paid the full original retail prices for the NES, SNES, Genesis, etc. Games varied somewhat more but older games tended to be a little cheaper too.

Meanwhile the last couple generations of consoles have stayed close to their launch prices, had a "Lite" version released, or have even gone *up* in price for various reasons.

I'm not sure why you think it has to be charging to have thermal runaway. You can find plenty of videos of lithium/etc batteries having thermal runaway without being actively charging. All it takes is a charged battery and physical damage.

Whether this particular case was warranted or not I can't answer, but it does say it had shown signs of deformation from the seat moving around.

Office 95, 97, and Netscape both used to do it too, and I think even Office 4.3 or whatever the last version for Windows 3.1 had a quicklaunch toolbar that sped up launch using similar methods. I'm blanking on others but I remember some other big software having agents that sat in the systray to speed up launch. I usually kept all that disabled because they just sat there eating memory when unused and the improvement in launch speeds wasn't worth it.

Everything old is new again.

My recollection with the early days of ReactOS was it was intended as much to enable using Windows drivers and underlying frameworks back when Linux and other options had much more limited hardware support, especially on the leading edge, as it was just for running Windows applications. Especially for stuff like graphics and wifi and DirectX where there was relatively limited support and being able to use vendor drivers and such would have been a big deal.

These days that's much less of a problem and stuff like WINE seems like it'd largely be the superior. Linux supports most hardware out of the box or very quickly, and what can't run is more of a software issue than an underlying lack of support issue. ReactOS might slot in as a replacement for embedded or specialized industrial uses, or maybe as an option for ancient/low end computers for people who still need to run Microsoft stuff, but I feel like it's increasingly irrelevant as time marches on. Windows is a moving target and they're still trying to get it to run Windows 2000-level stuff.

By and large NT 3.5x outperformed NT 3.1 on identical hardware. They optimized 3.5x a bunch and many people consider 3.51 to be the first "good" version.

As for using leaked XP code, that'd be an absolute nightmare from a licensing and legal perspective. I would expect Microsoft is constantly going over any project that claims to implement Windows features with fine toothed combs to make sure nobody has used leaked code. They've already plonked a couple projects like the kind of hilariously named OpenNT based on the NT4 leaks, someone trying to release an XP-based OS from leaked source would be in trouble real quick.

Most developers with much sense would avoid ever even the appearance of looking at leaked code. It could jeopardize them on any future project they might work on that happens to tangentially be related to either Windows core development or work on competing products/projects. When ReactOS did their big code audit they had to be wary of developers who had looked at it or were submitting patches clearly based on it, intentionally or not.

I've noticed that Google's AI summary stuff has started showing links to the pages its using to generate its answers for citations, but that it still occasionally comes up with completely off the wall stuff from having snarfed bad links with bad information on them. So it's still not completely trustworthy for being correct, but at least it's not completely mysterious where it came from.

I feel like Win2k (and XP) service packs were reasonably decent. I also don't remember having too much issue with even general updates with those, at least from a user perspective. I suppose towards the end XP got a little bit creaky from all the stuff bolted onto it while Vista/7 were delayed but I have mostly positive memories of it. I didn't do a whole lot with the server versions of those so can't really speak to the Server experience.

Win3.x and before mostly scraped by through the benefit of just not really having a whole lot of updates. There were Y2k fixes for 3.1 and up, and the 3.1 to 3.11 update (which was distinct from the WFW311 thing) which tweaked a few things, but there weren't a lot of other system-level updates to those like you saw later on. Especially not layers upon layers of them where later updates depended on earlier updates or it failed or having mixed versions of things blew up, or you installed IE4, then 5, then 5.5, then 6 on something and hoped for the best. I guess Win32s counts but since it was a whole separate subsystem it mostly left the base 3.x OS alone and was pretty easy to disable if it screwed something up.

Most remotely modern cars detect a passenger with electrical fields (capacitance? Something), not weight. So various electronics tend to be more likely to trip the sensors than a lot of other things.