On: Linux on iPad

[bredren]

It was cool back then, I played commander keen and lemmings on a gateway 2k. Lots of power, reactively cheap for a “ibm clone.”

But the reality is things are different now. The threat model is different.

You can’t just copy a “cdrom” full of 200 shareware titles you got in the mail and let your kids randomly run executables.

[solarengineer → bredren]

It was risky then too. MS DOS did have viruses, TSR programs and others could use TCP stacks ( like WatTCP ), data exfiltration via data files was a thing ( eg an infected wordstar that would save other files into a word star document being sent for printing).

I used to sell anti virus, and the threat models for some of the clients were Eye opening.

[bredren → solarengineer]

There was non-zero risk but it wasn’t remotely similar.

These machines dialed up bbs. No internet, no volumes of personal data like hd video and photos.

You didn’t have bank websites or online payment tools you could use people’s data to defraud.

My point is there no fitting the days of pc clones over today and having some direct comparison around “openness.”

[hedora → bredren]

You can on a raspberry pi. I recently confirmed keen runs as well on a rpi4 as it did on my old gw2k.

Win 3.1 audio drivers under dosbox are a bit beyond my current capacity for tinkering though.