I have to keep reminding myself of the type of machine people mean when they say "retired 486": That would typically be a generic 486DX/33, 486SX/33, or 486DX2/66 with ISA bus only, an antique [link|http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/#486|1994-or-earlier BIOS] incapable of supporting hard drives bigger than 504MB, 32MB of RAM, a single, slow IDE hard drive, a really cheesy Trident or C&T video chipset with from 256kB to 1MB video RAM, and either no NIC or some really cruddy NE2000 clone. And a 15" monitor.

My main machine for eight years running was a 486. Thus: AMI Enterprise III with three VLB slots, five EISA ones, and 16 SIMM sockets for fast-page RAM. Adaptec 1742A SCSI host adapter. ATI Mach32 VLB video card with 4 MB VRAM. Two 7200 RPM IBM SCSI hard drives. One 4x Toshiba SCSI CD-ROM drive. One Yamaha 4X CDR burner. Two 3Com 3C509B ethernet cards. It used a NEC 4FG with effectively a 16" display until I retired it and got my 17" ViewSonic. 32 MB RAM, eventually doubled (about halfway through its service life).

That machine was beefy enough to be my SMTP + Apache + ftp + ssh/shell server for all of my remote users, plus at the same time do local X11 desktop duty for me (fvwm2 window manager), plus at the same time burning CD-ROMs. (Mind you, this was in the days before Linux word processors hogging 73 MB of RAM just to load.)

It was more than acceptable for all of those simultaneous functions during all eight years of service, because I designed it for high I/O in Unix OSes, throughout the hardware. When I say "in Unix Oses", I mean that it was a balanced design, not skimping in some areas of hardware and splurging irrationally in others where Unixes don't benefit very much, resulting in an overall Unix system with sub-optimal performance for the dollar.

The reason I mention all this is the sucky-Linux-system-for-the-dollar syndrome's still with us, now being driven by a new gang of idiots: gamers.

That pretty much was inevitable, as a matter of market economics: The hardware market collapsed, and the only growth area remaining has been the sort of system marketed to teenagers of all ages who fancy themselves gamer D00DZ. You've probably seen them in PC clone shops, and wondered what the hell they were: Transparent compact Plexiglas cases with handles for carrying, neon tube lighting, garishly bright coloured motherboards, ridiculously overpowered CPUs (often 2.4 GHz Athlons) with oversized heat-sinks and fans, NVidia 3D video cards requiring proprietary X11 server software -- and sucky, pathetically under-engineered I/O in every area other than video.

The kiddies who favour these things are basically MS-Windows gamer types who wander over into Linux mailing lists and start giving dumbass hardware recommendations: I see that happen all the time, posting recommendations of poor-value hardware that's poorly balanced for Linux use -- way, way top-heavy on CPU power (and consequently on power draw and heat dissipation), while pathetically bad at I/O (especially mass storage).

My systems, including my former 486, get spec'd to give excellent performance for the dollar over many years of projected service life -- and also to get good parts longevity, through low heat build-up. The ones the kiddies are recommending are overpriced for their real-world Linux performance today, will tend to die early (because of heat), and won't wear well over the years to come. And they're making the same type of error that people made earlier, just with fancier and newer hardware.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com