Day: Below I'll address only one item in your lengthy reinvention of x86 DOS FIDOnet.
Suggest you take a look at http://www.silentpcreview.com/article17-page2.html for real world comparison of power requirements of readily available low power motherboards. The VIA Epia M9000 Mini-ITX Motherboard _with_ CPU costs less than $100 and is significantly more powerful than your 80486 reference system. These units are industry standard x86 off the shelf mobo which are available at many local computer parts stores and over the Internet by simply doing a search. I know of several locations which use this approach for solar powered/battery powered systems which run 24/7/365. Eight years ago this level of integration and computing power would cost nearly $1000 USD because the suppliers were extremely low volume embedded processor specialty units - mostly in the PC-104 form factor. Day if your really serious about building a successful and reliable installation there comes a time when parochial attitude pinning for the past era of Personal Computers which had DOS 3.1 are simply not realistic. Do you still drive a 1913 Ford Model T Speedster to work? Well that is about where your proposed x86 DOS FIDOnet system is in the evolutionary scale when compared to computer operating systems and low power inexpensive hardware which is readily available today. John Oram Day Brown wrote: snip > > > Another thing to consider are the power requirements. I have surfed the > net with a 486 I built that ran off solar panels on only 20 watts, with > another 8 watts for the LCD and 5 when I wanted something stored on the > IDE. All the cheap motherboards I've seen available these days run 50 > watts or more. Which translates into *much* less run time on a battery > backup. And if we do see a significant Internet crash, either from > sabotage, stupidity, or Murphy's law, chances are the power grid will be > interrupted as well. >
