I don’t understand the authors urge to do this.

that's because this "challenge" is the type of thing for college kids to do for the lulz. the author believes that this is interesting to people outside their social sphere.

they are incorrect. at least in my opinion.

like a microwave with abandonment issues.

Yeah, i know that one.

I did worse, resurrected a 1999 industrial 486SX on Win98B. It was fun as hell trying to figure it all out again, and most references are gone from the early web. Which reminds me, time to get that 10-BaseT NIC working!

That’s a little interesting because of the old 486sx and the lack of handholding.

I think deploying dos and/or win3.1 with audio and 3d gfx would be interesting due to the lack of memory management and manual hardware config. Windows xp was pretty simple though.

I have a 486, but with MS-DOS 6.2 and Norton Commander as a UI. Haven't booted it up for about a decade, though, but don't see a reason why it shouldn't work. My Win98SE computer (Pentium 100), on the other hand, is still my gaming rig. Don't need anything better for HoMM2, Master of Orion 2, and TES: Daggerfall.

I have successfully reflowed the solder of a laptop doing this. Lost the audio doing it, though it worked after that