Would you mind pointing out or naming one of the MIPS boards?
Not that I doubt you, but I've been looking for them for a couple years and have yet to find anything MIPS in that price range, except a few routers.

x86 has more OSs available.
The vendor supports DOS, Linux, and purportedly WIndows. From what I understand, "Windows" would be "XP or older", since a Vortex86EX appears to be 586-level or so.
Coincidentally, that's the same ISA as Galileo.

It's an option if you have some 16-bit code that you need to keep going...which is especially likely on any sort of continuation of an older hardware project.

The other aspect is that you can compile on your PC without setting up a cross-compiling environment. On the one hand, that's easier. On the other hand, you don't learn to cross-compile. And on the gripping hand, these processors are the sort where you don't want to compile natively.

This should be able to run standard Debian.

Or is that an attempt at a joke?

50% right.
The one true editor is vi (including alternate implementations such as nvi, vim, and busybox vi).
But bbcode? WRONG.
Troff is the right solution for multiformat documents. Including ones that need to be readable in word processors.

Half joking, half serious. I wrote my papers for Philosophy and Intro to UnixÂin troff. For Philosophy I converted them to RTF before submitting-which worked fairly well.
For Intro to Unix, I used -thtml and -tps. Again, it worked pretty well.

I can use Markdown, and have written a couple manpages.
(My favorite is for "segfault", a quick hack I threw together because someone was asking about example programs for a debugging presentation.)

By now you're probably thinking "Neckbeard!"...nope, I majored in agriculture; and those papers were for GE courses in the last couple years.
I used Ted for editing my longer papers, and found it to be generally satisfactory. Files are guaranteed to be readable on just about any computer, being RTF written properly. And the document actually ends up displaying the same in Word.
Ted runs quite happily on an 800-MHz processor, like the old PIII I used for a month or two after losing my laptop.

Empathise is the word you want, not emphasise; that changes the meaning very significantly.

Most patents affecting what they have, especially the 2D portion, should be expired by now.
If they aren't, this probably counts as prior art in its own right.

This fits on some pretty small Xilinx and Altera boards:
Spartan 3, Cyclone II 25, and Cyclone III.
If you look in the right place, $30 is likely to be enough.

This company already has somewhat of a market (air traffic being one, IIRC). But yes, it is niche.
Now, the full product has some nice features like a builtin VNC server...

Wrong. None of the projects on opencores have something that's anywhere near this far along and feature-complete.
There are LCD controllers, text mode VGA designs, and one or two framebuffer-level VGA adapters. And framebuffer is essentially garbage.

The Kickstarter is for a code drop, no hardware.

According to Francis Bruno, the 2D version fits on a Cyclone II 25 or a Spartan 3.

Still, I'm inclined to think it makes more sense to listen to someone who's done something that worked than someone who isn't interested in trying it "because it won't work"...

...until the power bill spoils your fun.

Especially 'older' x86 gear is easily in the 130-150 watts range idle, compared to ~10 watts for a typical home router. Another issue is the antenna situation, you don't want long cables to 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz antennas, but at the same time keeping the close to a big steel PC case affects your reception as well. The same goes with the price, while you can get a decent 2.4 GHz wlan card for around 20 EUR, 5 GHz capable ones start around 40 EUR - so the radios alone easily reach the price ranged asked for pretty good mass-produced plastic router (which have no interference/ shielding issues).

In most cases, unless we're counting the number of concurrent users in the medium 2-figure range, a cheap plastic router is a much better choice, which pays off within a few months just through saved electricity. With only a bit of searching you can even find pretty hackable devices as well.

OP said "an old netbook".
I don't know which one he has, but my 2009 Atom N270-based Aspire One netbook ran a little under 20 watts, per Powertop. That's hardly worthy of mention.

If it's a netbook, there's no steel case.

If it supports master mode in all the operating systems named, my guess is he has an Atheros card.
Those can be pretty good, depending on the card; a number of the commercial routers use them, though DD-WRT targets Broadcom cards.