Reading the “historical” articles on Filfre.net and watching the Halt and Catch fire TV series, I got hit by nostalgia, from when I was playing with my AMD 386 DX, still in service until the end of the 90s.
So, I immediately downloaded PCem and 86box, searching for the BIOS ROMs of my old PCs. I got a lot of problems, but I will talk about that another time. Then I found IBMulator and I immediately reminded my friend and his old PS/1. Even if when it was introduced (1990) was already incredibly outdated (a 286 CPU when you could buy a PC with a 486… of course with a much higher price), I was impressed because of its “simplified” OS, very fast to load.
In a few minutes, I found all the files on https://ps1stuff.wordpress.com/download/downloads-for-type-2011/ (even n my language!!!) and I immediately did a manual restore on the empty virtual disk (if you bought a new system at the time, this was already done in the factory, you just needed to turn it on)
This emulator is awesome, it simulates all the disk and floppy noises, and also the CRT screen. But it also simulates the fan noise, that at the time was very noisy 😅
I got some initial problem to let it load the OS from the floppy. That error “press F1” at the start, means something changed in the system, for example, more memory, or a new hard drive, you need to confirm by running the “configuration” program.
In total, I took about 15 minutes, to copy 5 megabytes from 4 floppy disks… so slow! I forgot this part!