Technology @ LIVE SMALL BAG

Resurrecting the Gateway Handbook 486

What's this old fossil?

The Handbook 486 is an early 90's era sub-notebook PC. It was revolutionary in its day, a marvel of engineering at the time. In the age of the netbook, unwitting people would not be impressed by its capabilities; for techies, it is a subtle celebration of technology that made small computers a reality.

At some point I'll colorfully describe the actual hardware. For now, know that it has the following specs:

• Intel 80486 SX (25/33Mhz) or DX (40/50Hmz)
• 640 x 480 greyscale display
• One PCMCIA Type 2 Slot
• Built in PS/2 port and PS/2 mouse
• 20MB RAM(max), 4MB internal
• IDE drive slot (8GB bios maximum)

Why bother with a hunk of junk like that?

In a nutshell, I wanted an text only machine that would work off of standard rechargable batteries that ran a modern OS and was mostly disposable. I say mostly disposable in that if it was lost or stolen I wouldn't fret it too much. The Gateway Handbook mostly fits those qualifications. They can be found for a song (if you look in the right places), they can be modified to accept AA batteries as a power source, and they can run a modern operating system, in my case, OpenBSD.

How'd you do it, dude?

Out of the box, none of the current Unixes would work comfortably on the Handbook. I tried OpenBSD and NetBSD, and both had kernels weighing in around 9mb, leaving about 800kb of RAM free to the user. Both OSes were already nibbling into swap. On a platter drive this wouldn't concern me as much but when the hard drive is a Compact Flash card, I don't want to end its lifespan prematurely just doing junk swap writes.

Against OpenBSD recommendation, I compiled a trimmed down kernel by commenting out a ton of useless drivers. Everything USB and Bluetooth, 90% of the Ethernet devices, etc. The result is a 2.5mb kernel (awesome!) and it leaves me with 6mb free RAM for user applications. I'll link the configuration files for OpenBSD 4.9 when I get the machine back up and running. The really awesome thing about the Handbook is that since it is an i386, compiling the kernel on another (thousand times faster!) machine works like a charm.

There are still a few nagging issues. I can get some PCMCIA network cards, but all of the wireless cards I have spit out some 'TX buffer allocation' error when it is inserted, and it does not work. I haven't had time to play with the Handbook enough to need to fix the issue yet, but it's on the hitlist.