This could be very useful to run really old PC tied commercial and industrial equipment. There is a surprising amount of old systems still keeping our lives running in small niche ways. It could be:

• your school system's ancient HVAC system
• an old electron microscope in a biology or materials science lab
• an old pc based CNC mill

The fact that this has all the legacy ports of:

• IEEE 1284 parallel printer port
• RS-232 serial port
• a 16 bit ISA slot breakout!

...gives this some of the newest hardware I can think of that still interfaces with old ancient hardware.

$200? Jeez.

I got a $32 11" Dell Chromebook last month to use as a video player at work, it's great. Stuck in a 128GB microSD and it's better than fine.

And I can listen to the baseball game on it, when I'm not watching Star Trek. 😁

I'd be interested in the form factor with like a raspberry pi in there.

Less powerful than that seems like a waste.

It runs Doom, but unplayable speed. They should have run it as 386DX. Had one from AMD, it was running quite well.

LGR has a nice review of this and a similar machine: https://piped.video/watch?v=6bODiZ5bP84

My second hand t480 is cheaper than that with 512 gigs of ssd storage and 16 gigs of ram

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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 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 800x480 IPS display panel, a 4,000 mAh battery, and a CompactFlash slot for storage.

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.

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Gimme gimme gimme that transparent shell

I saw a story about this every day for the last four days. Why this product getting so much pushing?