Pocket8086 Lets You DOS On-the-Go, is a Tiny Time Machine That Fits in Your Bag

If you find yourself staring longingly at an old floppy disk and wondering where all the charm has gone in modern gadgets, the Pocket8086 might just be the ticket to bring you back to the warm light of a CRT. This compact device from Chinese manufacturer 8086YES! manages to compress the essence of an 80s IBM PC XT into a clamshell that’s smaller than the typical tablet, which is quite a squeeze to say the least.

This device measures 8.3 inches wide, 4.3 inches deep, and 1.3 inches thick, so it will fit easily inside your jacket pocket. It weighs about the same as a heavy paperback and is powered by a 4,000 mAh lithium-ion battery that keeps the screen lit for a long time, providing long train rides an excellent opportunity to learn some (still very) useful DOS commands.

When you open the lid, you’ll see a 7-inch IPS display with an 800 by 480 resolution. The resolution is an honest tribute to the era’s constraints, but the screen easily accommodates both 16:9 widescreen and the old 4:3 ratio; simply press Fn+F4 to switch between them and you’re ready to go. You can even adjust the brightness and contrast directly from the on-screen menus, while the TVGA9000i processor works its magic in the background, with 512 KB of video memory to boot. Oh, and if the on-board view becomes too cozy for your liking, you can stream output to an external monitor via VGA as well. Stereo speakers bring the party to life with OPL3-compatible music and a 3.5mm connection for headphones if you want to keep the beeps and boops to yourself.

The keyboard greets your fingers with a warm welcome, much like an old friend who has shrunk but yet understands what you want: compact, QWERTY layout, but the keys are little firmer than you would be used to. Each one is pretty tightly packed in with its neighbors, so the old touch-typing dance is a careful waltz rather than a sprint – and there’s even a dedicated Turbo button hidden away next to the space bar to boost that old clock speed to 10 MHz when 4.77 MHz feels a little slow. Navigation is very traditional, using standard arrow keys and a homemade mouse emulator via the question mark and Shift for cursor control in DOS. With a bit more precision, you can always plug in a PS/2 mouse or keyboard through the side connector, or a combination of the two.

The power comes from a NEC V30 processor, a 16-bit chip that is pin-compatible with the original Intel 8086 or 8088, and there is an option to run purely in real mode for an authentic XT experience. If you want to spice things up, you can even swap it out for a V20 using the board’s jumper settings. Memory is capped at 768 KB, divided into 640 KB base and 128 KB upper, which is slightly more than the ordinary XT, but not significantly. Storage is on a CompactFlash card with a healthy 2 GB in FAT16 format (a 512 MB unit is provided), and it boots directly to MS-DOS 6.22 with a recovery program that employs Ghost images in case things go wrong. Windows 3.0 or 3.1 also loads up smoothly; nevertheless, keep in mind that the real-mode arrangement simplifies multitasking.

An 8-bit ISA bus is hidden behind a header, waiting for a modular audio, network, or storage add-on to appear, as well as the option of adding a slot for a sound card, network adapter, or additional storage controller. There is also a parallel and serial header, as well as a CH375B chip, which allows us to see USB drives as mass storage in DOS. No Wi-Fi or Bluetooth here; this system sticks to its old-school roots, thanks to a modified IBM PC-XT BIOS from 1985 that handles the low-level grunt work. A stylish translucent plastic casing allows you have a glance at the interior, while the clear or smoked gray choices let you see the whole thing. While open source documentation that includes circuit diagrams and BIOS code sits on the maker’s site for anyone curious enough to have a dive

Tindie prices hover around $145, but AliExpress pushes them to $188, depending on how many extras you add. This is for the entire kit, which includes the device, a CF card, power adapter, and those port adapters.
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