windows 95

$200-ish laptop with a 386 and 8MB of RAM is a modern take on the Windows 3.1 era

MS-DOS, Tech, windows 3.1, windows 95 / Ryan Harris / June 22, 2024

blast from the slightly more recent past —

Pocket 386 supports external accessories and will just barely run Windows 95.

Andrew Cunningham – Jun 21, 2024 9: 18 pm UTC

The Pocket 386, a new-old laptop that can run MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and (technically) Windows 95.

DZT’s Store
The Pocket 386 isn’t sleek, but it’s a lot smaller than an actual 386 laptop would be.

DZT’s Store
The system in clear, plus the included dongles for adding external ports.

DZT’s store

Of the many oddities you can buy from Aliexpress, some of the weirdest are the recreations of retro computer systems in semi-modern designs. We’re most intimately familiar with the Book 8088, a recreation of the original 1981 IBM PC inside a chunky clamshell laptop. The people behind the Book 8088 are also responsible for the Hand386, which is a bit like a late-80s PC stuck inside an old Palm Pilot or Blackberry, and a second revision of the Book 8088 with more built-in ports and a VGA-capable graphics adapter installed instead of a basic CGA adapter.

Whoever is selling these systems is now back with the Pocket 386, which combines Hand386-style internals with a clamshell design similar to the Book 8088. The result is the kind of IBM-compatible system that would have been common during the Windows 3.1 era, when MS-DOS still dominated (especially for games) but Windows was on the upswing.

The heart of the laptop isn’t a genuine retro 386 but an Ali M6117 embedded processor. This is a newer chip that integrates a 40 MHz 80386SX CPU core along with an ALi M1217B chipset. The system also includes 8MB of RAM, one of three different replaceable VGA adapters (either a Cirrus Logic CL-GD542X, a TVGA9000i, or a CHIPS F655x5), a Yamaha OPL3 sound card, an 800×480 IPS display panel, a 4,000 mAh battery, and a CompactFlash slot for storage. There’s no built-in trackpad, though the arrow keys can be used to simulate a mouse. The system also includes a USB port, though as with the Book 8088, it may be usable for mass storage but not for typical USB accessories.

Enlarge / The Pocket 386 supports standard ports like PS/2 and VGA via a number of custom ports and external dongles.

DZT’s Store

For accessories, the laptop includes a few ports on the back that can be attached to external dongles; included dongles can be used to add PS/2, VGA, parallel, and serial ports to the system. The Pocket 386 is available in both a semi-translucent black finish and a clear finish, and though its normal list price is $300, it’s currently listed for $187. An adapter for adding external ISA expansion cards is sold separately.

This system could technically run Windows 95, and the seller will send you a working Windows 95 disk image (in the GHO format used by the ancient Norton Ghost backup and restore software, so you’ll need to figure that out). The Pocket 386 is just over the minimum requirements for Windows 95, which wanted a 20 MHz 386DX processor or better and at least 4MB of RAM. But even running off of a CompactFlash card instead of an ancient spinning HDD, expect Windows 95 support to be slow at best, particularly because of the technically inferior 386SX processor and the still-pretty-scanty 8MB of memory.

This system will work best if you stick to Windows 3.x and MS-DOS, though the extra CPU speed and RAM will make it infinitely more useful for retro apps and games than the Book 8088 running the same MS-DOS and early Windows software.

Listing image by DZT’s store

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“Temporary” disk formatting UI from 1994 still lives on in Windows 11

some things never change —

“It wasn’t elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived.” It never did.

Andrew Cunningham – Mar 25, 2024 4: 39 pm UTC

If you've formatted a disk in Windows in the last 30 years, you may have come across this dialog box. — Enlarge / If you’ve formatted a disk in Windows in the last 30 years, you may have come across this dialog box.

Andrew Cunningham

Windows 11 has done a lot to update and modernize long-neglected parts of Windows’ user interface, including many Settings menus and venerable apps like Notepad and Paint. But if you dig deep enough, you’ll still find parts of the user interface that look and work like they did in the mid-’90s, either for compatibility reasons or because no one ever thought to go back and update them.

Former Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer shared some history about one of those finely aged bits: the Format dialogue box, which is still used in fully updated Windows 11 installs to this day when you format a disk using Windows Explorer.

Plummer says he wrote the Format dialog in late 1994, when the team was busy porting the user interface from the consumer-focused Windows 95 (released in mid-1995) to the more-stable but more resource-intensive Windows NT (NT 4.0, released in mid-1996, was the first to use the 95-style UI).

Formatting disks “was just one of those areas where Windows NT was different enough from Windows 95 that we had to come up with some custom UI,” wrote Plummer on X, formerly Twitter. Plummer didn’t specify what those differences were, but even the early versions of Windows NT could already handle multiple filesystems like FAT and NTFS, whereas Windows 95 mostly used FAT16 for everything.

“I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on,” Plummer continued. “Then I busted out [Visual] C++ 2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn’t elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived. That was some 30 years ago, and the dialog is still my temporary one from that Thursday morning, so be careful about checking in ‘temporary’ solutions!”

The Windows NT version of the Format dialog is the one that survives today because the consumer and professional versions of Windows began using the NT codebase in the late ’90s and early 2000s with the Windows 2000 and Windows XP releases. Plenty has changed since then, but system files like the kernel still have “Windows NT” labels in Windows 11.

Plummer also said the Format tool’s 32GB limit for FAT volumes was an arbitrary decision he made that we’re still living with among modern Windows versions—FAT32 drives formatted at the command line or using other tools max out between 2TB and 16TB, depending on sector size. It seems quaint, but PC ads from late 1994 advertise hard drives that are, at most, a few hundred megabytes in size, and 3.5-inch 1.44MB floppies and CD-ROM drives were about the best you could do for removable storage. From that vantage point, it would be hard to conceive of fingernail-sized disks that could give you 256GB of storage for $20.

Plummer was involved with many bits and pieces of ’90s- and early 2000s-era MS-DOS and Windows apps, including the Task Manager, the Space Cadet Pinball game, and the first version of the product activation system that shipped with Windows XP. Plummer left Microsoft in 2003.

Listing image by Getty