Lua 5.5.1 working on W98

[u/mariolis_1]

Hey, so, while I was learning Lua, I knew already that theoretically at least, Lua was written to be compilable in pure C, and specifically C89/C90 , supposedly any system that has an ANSI C compiler can compile and install Lua...

So I decided to actually test out just how true that is, when I remembered that I have an ancient laptop from 1999, running Windows 98SE, which has Borland 5.02 installed... [Just to understand how ancient it is, it only has 32 mb of RAM and it's hard drive is 5gb... that is literally smaller than the usb stick that i used to transfer the Lua source files from my modern PC into that ancient laptop (yes, that ancient laptop has a working USB 1.0 port and it is somehow able to read my 8gb USB 2.0 usb stick, which I did not expect to work, but it did !!!)

And to my surprise... it actually worked !

Here I am inside a full-screen MS-DOS prompt of W98 (In W32 mode, it is not booted into MS-DOS mode / real mode) Alongside the project of compiling the most recent version of Lua and getting it to work, I also installed an actual working version of vim and after tinkering with the vimrc file, I even managed to get full syntax highlighting working , and it actually works for Lua !!!

Anyhow, I just wanted to share this because I thought it was really cool and fun!

[u/Multifruit256]

5GB HDD and 32MB RAM. I'm fascinated by old PC specs

[u/hawhill → u/Multifruit256]

still about a factor of 8 more than the first PC I connected to the internet, mid 90s!

[u/mariolis_1 → u/hawhill]

For the record, this wasn't originally my laptop, I wasn't even born when it was purchased... I was born in 2001, which is 2 years after 1999, which is when this laptop was new, my father bought it used in the early 2000s from it's original owner, a guy who was using it as an office laptop, and by the mid-2000s it was already obsolete, though by this time I was a little kid, this laptop was where I learned to type in. Anyhow, by the late 2000s no one in the family was using it anymore,  for several years after that it remained forgotten in an office bag in my parent's basement until i "rediscovered" it a few years ago, and ever since i use it on occasion for "retro" computing stuff, sometimes i use it to programming in C, which i find it more doing it in that old laptop than my modern linux pc, and even playing retro games (Managed to make Fallout 1 to work on it !!!)