Modern Linux Running on a 27-Year-Old Toshiba Laptop

We feature a lot of vintage computers here on the Hackster blog, and they usually run in one of two ways: with the original hardware and operating system, or with the motherboard replaced by a new single-board computer that runs a modern operating system. There is an obvious reason for that, which is that old hardware is very slow and isn’t usually capable of running modern operating systems. Despite that, MingcongBai has managed to get a modern Linux distro running on a 27-year-old Toshiba laptop.

The laptop in question is a Toshiba T4900CT, which was manufactured sometime around 1992. This quirky little laptop was perfect for ’90s professionals on the go, and featured a state-of-the-art color LCD screen, a trackpoint mouse, mouse buttons on the front of the laptop for some reason, and a good ol’ fashioned floppy disk drive. It was also the first laptop to come equipped with an Intel Pentium processor — an i586 cycling at a blistering 75MHz. It had a whopping 810MB hard drive, and a generous 40MB of RAM.

While those specs were top-of-the-line for a laptop at the time, they’re laughable by modern standards — your fancy new IoT thermostat has more processing power. Even so, MingcongBai has managed to get a modern Linux distro running on it. That distro is the i586 port of AOSC OS/Retro, which is designed specifically for vintage computers. Surprisingly, it doesn’t seem that MingcongBai had to do anything particularly special to make this work, which is a testament to how efficient the operating system is. There is even a demonstration of it running systemd and Neofetch! We just hope that our shiny new laptops manage to last as long as this old Toshiba.