#book8088 — Public Fediverse posts

My book8088 died suddenly on me.

The battery indicator leds were blinking slowly, which means "battery charged"

And then it wouldn't charge until I put its charger on a different outlet?!?

It may need a new battery?

Or perhaps an exorcism...😞

#book8088

The Book8088 Gets a Post-Hype Review - Last year, a couple of rather unusual computers emerged from China: a 386sx-based ... - https://hackaday.com/2024/02/22/the-book8088-gets-a-post-hype-review/ #retrocomputing #book8088 #v20

A size comparison for the curious. The #Book8088 is about 50% larger and thicker than the #HP200LX. In return, you get a backlit color VGA screen, an OPL3 Adlib, a rattly netbook keyboard instead of a chiclet keyboard, a full-sized serial port, a parallel port, and a bus expansion port. (You also get no instant-on capability, a vastly diminished battery life, and no ability to run on AA's. It's not a direct upgrade, by any means.)

For me, the machines fill different niches. The HP #200LX is a productivity machine for daily use... sort of a PIM-organizer-multitool that can host arbitrary DOS software. The 200LX is also a better programming machine due to its built-in task switching.

Meanwhile, the Book 8088 is better for longform writing, audiovisual projects, and general "flop on the couch in the dark and be unproductive" downtime.

They complement each other very nicely!

So I've done some testing of this on my #Book8088
and it seems to mount everything the older driver does and is a lot faster.

FreddyV #CH375 driver 0.22

(#v20 book8088 can use the 286 optimized version 😁)

VOGONS Vintage Driver Library
https://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=1991&menustate=0

Is #ELKS (8086 linux) still a thing? Would the #book8088 be a good machine for it?

I suspect the #XTCF BIOS wants a DOS4 style partition table so i dunno if the old 8086 UNIXes (#coherent, #xenix, #minix) would cooperate.

Then there's the whole issue of installing such a thing on a machine that doesn't support floppy drives... 😝