What's so bad about Intel 8086 in technical terms?

[TeamBlackFox]

Agreed I'd love to see a good MIPS desktop come about - but until then my 2.5 Ghz G5 quad is trucking right along - just checked the cooling unit the other day, its in fantastic shape. The case has seen better days, but thats just superficial.

I have an SGI Fuel running at 600mhz and it works very well for basic things - but if I need the oomph my G5 can take it. I also have a dream of getting an SGI Tezro, but that will be when I'm in better finances.

[TeamBlackFox]

The best solution to most problems are hybrids.

Eh I still prefer the monolithic kernels - mostly the BSD and System V kernels for performance reasons, BUT DragonFly BSD is a hybrid kernel, and it may just turn out to be the magic bullet against GNU/Linux - if it ever gets anywhere. 10 years and while its usable - its painful...

[TeamBlackFox]

Well Freqmax I like the kernel used in the Amiga family as its one of the few that doesn't incur severe overhead ( Mach and Hurd suck as anything more than hobbyist kernels due to overhead/message passing lag )

I don't know enough coding to know how to get a modern BSD onto something that small and without an MMU -  NetBSD/Amiga requires an MMU to run for example: http://www.de.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/

If you're interested in trying to code, you may want to look at 4.4BSD Lite or the open source Research UNIX versions - as far as archaic UNIX go they're the best bet for finding one that isn't dependent on MMU.

[TeamBlackFox]

Alright then. You'll need to be a guru at K&R style C. Plus, you do realize the 4.4BSD install will be smaller after you build it right?

[TeamBlackFox]

The only RISC processor that I like is 32 bit MIPS as all the others are horribly complex.

I've only done a little MIPS64 ASM but coding for the R14k in my Fuel has been pretty darn easy, and my friend who is learning ARM64 ASM says its easy too. Whats so complex between MIPS32 and MIPS64 other than the extended modes for 64-bit addressing and such?

[TeamBlackFox]

> I'm sure 64 bit mips is better on a technical level (more bits is better  right?), but I just prefer the 32 bit version. I thought maybe now the  thread is derailed I'd throw in my emotional preference.       

You're right it is sort of derailed. But if you ever have interest in trying out a MIPS64 machine let me know as I plan on setting up one of my SGIs headless soon. I'd be happy to hand out an ssh account. All of mine are MIPS64 so yeah...