Yes it's already written. Use a kernel with the code still there. It's not like your 486 will have any application that requires the latest kernel, if your system even manages to boot at all.

The problem with written code is that if it remains "supported" it places a burden on all other code changes made to the product. Someone needs to do regression testing to make sure it's not broken. Someone needs to do security auditing and potential bug fixing. And above all, these are not reasonable requirements for hardware that old. Hence "not supported" means "not supported" i.e. the programmer won't or in some cases actually can't support it.

Software is not hardware, you can run old software. It's still there. It's not like the network switch example above.

Could and Did are two distinct words in the English language. Very few 486 machines ever existed with more than 64MB of RAM. They were for insanely niche applications. Now we change the debate from do we support what is today an incredibly rare architecture, to do we support what is today an incredibly rare architecture for the purpose of a niche that almost certainly doesn't exist anymore on that platform?

We can keep going down this rabbit hole of "but it did support", only to find there's a single machine on the planet that actually had that hardware config, and Bob hasn't used that machine in decades.

Are you talking about professional well made IoT devices designed for corporate management? Because holy shit are you wrong about general consumer IoT devices doing no listening. There's a reason for the running joke that the S in IoT stands for security.

In fact much of the community driven IoT interfaces for tinkerers rely on the fact that someone has hacked a device almost universally via an active open listening port to force it to work with something other than it's Cloud service.

Your best beat at security: Isolate them on your network and firewall your inbound connections.

From the most current OS/2 release:

"Hardware Requirements
Intel Pentium Pro or higher, or an AMD Athlon or higher. 64 Bit CPUs are supported (however ArcaOS will run in 32-bit mode). Computers with ARM CPUs are not supported. Apple Computers are not supported (regardless of CPU). The Vortex86 CPU is not sufficiently compatible to run ArcaOS and is not supported."

i.e. minimum hardware requirements are a 686 instruction set.

Kewl insult. Do you have an explanation?...or are too lazy to justify your comment?

Also, your logic is stupid. I'm not authoring the goddamn page, I am just trying to buy a product or do some research or use an app. I have no choice in the tooling someone else uses.

Also, it's not the defacto standard for full stack development. That's wishful thinking on your part so you'll not have to open a book and learn another language. Java still has greater penetration among anyone who has a budget and knows what they're doing. At best, node.js replaced PHP, which was always the low-budget entry-level language. JavaScript is an absolute shit language for server-side unless you move to typescript...and even then...why bother? Java performs far better, has a larger community, more penetration, and is just a better platform. My hope was the AI revolution would lead to less Python and JavaScript where they don't belong. In the browser?...well, it's basically the only option. Node.js was just a means of making users suffer so UI professionals wouldn't have to learn a superior technology. Hopefully, they can just vibe-code some Java until they can afford to hire a real professional. With typescript?...OK, at least they addressed the reliability aspect....but yeah, you're adding the same amount of complexity as Java, only noticeably slower and less scalable and efficient.

And if you're like most professionals I've talked to, I'll anticipate you taking offense at my comment. I'll prematurely respond to what I anticipate your response to be: You may be AWESOME at writing node.js services and write perfect tests and create works of beauty. The problem is you'll be rewarded with a promotion and your app will get handed off to someone more junior.

I inherited one (I'm definitely junior at node.js), it imported a Google lib, which needed a security update to the latest version. They completely rewrote the signature of every function. That's shitty of Google...but it is what it is. If it were Java/C#/Rust/C++/Go? It would be a 1h task to fix. The compiler would catch every error. Not only would Java catch every error in my code I wrote, it would catch every signature error in every lib I imported very quickly, typically on startup. Node.js? Oh, it starts. It will only catch the simplest errors on request.

OK. So here I am with an app I don't understand because the original author rage quit. Her wiki is horribly out of date, just like every wiki page I've written...we're all guilty of that! So I have to guess the functionality. I know what everyone else knows. But had a nice multi-day trial and error of testing every function point to check for missed signatures. Turns out she wrote shit unit tests, which honestly...many devs do...so the builds passed. It ended up being a 2 week ordeal because a whole batch were caught in production, by users, because of some undocumented functionality that was added in later.

If it were typescript? I think it would have found it. If it was Java, I know it wouldn't have passed the build. When you're the only author? You can do whatever you want with whatever you want. If work for a larger employer and have real teams, you cannot rely on your talent alone. That's why dynamically and untyped languages are usually inferior choices for corporate development.

However, the core complaint is not about node.js....that's between you and your hosting-env/hyperscalar. My problem is MASSIVE complex websites that render simple static content, yet make 100s of REST calls to build a page in a real-time on my client...rather than just build the final page...save it somewhere. And to your point, it's not JavaScript's faults that there are idiots out there. However, the community certainly seems to be embracing and encouraging all sorts of complexity and frameworks.

Every front-end-dev I've talked to as well as the ones I work with daily will tell you that you need many modern frameworks in your work product in order to stay employable....specifically meaning if you write a simple HTML page with simple minimal JavaScript, the first guy who sees your page will tell your boss you're a clueless moron who doesn't know his way around React/Vue.js/Angular/Svelte...not that you do know your way and thought they were a fit for larger projects. So let's add 100 dependencies in your build and many frameworks....so people know you know what you're doing. So now the user has this slow page and gets to watch it rerender in real-time on his page...making it challenging to know when it's fully loaded and having links and buttons move around on him/her...I've many times accidentally clicked the wrong function on an app because it moved the buttons around in the time between when I position my mouse and click.

But to the OP's original, this is not about Java. This is fully about JavaScript...and more precisely, misuse by JavaScript. It's just a tool. It's the author's fault the page is a mess and horrible time to use.

Linux isn't suitable as a real-time OS now either strictly speaking. In fact that one of the top hits from a search on Linux RTOS is a paper from NASA (from a comparatively recent 2019) discussing the performance of Linux with every RTOS relevant kernel feature set into the most ideal position. Their conclusion was... well you probably will hit your event deadline if you throw fast enough hardware at it, but it is still nothing like a true RTOS.

386 and 486 CPUs were back in the day. I used a commodore 64 for most of my school life and a word processor / typewriter when I needed something that could print text better than the ancient thermal printer I had (no joke I had an okidata thermal printer for my commodore. Quality was good but when you eventually couldn't get the regular paper you had to buy the rolls and I had the jury rig a feeder)

A lot of people complain about the Sega 32x and Atari Jaguar ports of Doom but it was mind-blowing to be able to play Doom on $300 worth of hardware in 1995. If you wanted a computer that could match the performance of even a Sega 32x you were dropping at least $1,500. Literally five times the price.

But I do remember when prices came down after I got back into computers after a bit. Picking up a 486 DX 100 for about $150 and then going to a computer shop asking for a Vesa local bus video card for it and the guy just pulled it out of a junk pile and gave it to me. Remember going home and booting up primal rage and X-Men children of the atom on that thing and being blown away with that computer could do. Terminal velocity .

You almost figured it out. It's almost like when we use a completely different vehicle where everything including all technology inside is different that you want to test things slowly before jumping feet first down on the moon.

No, this is the first in the missions for the Orange Nazi to build his moon base.

AI slop articles that get summarized into yet more AI slop. I doubt many humans read this stuff.

It doesn't affect text so ctrl F still works. The rest can be mitigated by supplying element sizes in the HTML.

You have a short memory. This shit show isn't worse than the past. MS very much pushed out colossally fucked up updates, even back in the XP days. Heck back then, before the days of automated recovery processes shit was MUCH worse. There were actual updates that may have forced you to go looking for your Windows XP install disc to fix.

Your comment fails for the same reason. By your reasoning you don't know anything about Microsoft's process but you're declaring victory for Open Source. The reality is that everything who makes this an open vs closed issue is very ignorantly missing the underlying fact that security update affect all platforms and all practices for releasing code, open or closed. Just in different ways.

It does not. Zero-days are a thing on Linux. EOL is a thing on Linux, and many modern distros very much will force auto-update packages marked as a security risk.

Congrats, you so clever. All users did this in the 90s. It was a security nightmare, especially when people were proud of running out of date buggy software. You may be an expert and capable of curating your update process (I'll give you the benefit of doubt, generous of me since you think this concept is OS related) but that doesn't mean what you do is even remotely appropriate for 99% of users out there, regardless of what OS they use.

And yet the answer is actually yes. Unless all you do is Linux command line stuff or browse static webpages using a browser that last was standards compliant in the early 2000s, 4GB is not longer a viable minimum for anyone who doesn't also spend their evenings self-flagellating. It's masochistic to use an underperforming computer.