Weird AliExpress laptop with Intel 8088 CPU will take you back to the MS-DOS era

• The "Book 8088" laptop is a modern clamshell system that attempts to recreate the magic of the original IBM PC from 1981. [credit: Xinrui Technology ]

All modern Intel and AMD PCs can trace their roots to a single system: the IBM Personal Computer. Originally released in August 1981, this computer became so popular and long-lived that competitors reverse-engineered its BIOS so that their computers could use the same software and peripherals, a practice that eventually resulted in a de facto standard whose descendants we still use today.

If you want to experience what using an old IBM PC was like, you could drop a few hundred dollars on a used one on eBay. Or you could roll the dice on this new oddball laptop on AliExpress. The "Book 8088" laptop PC combines modern components with an Intel 8088 processor and 640KB (yes, that's kilobytes) of memory. A few more modern amenities make it nicer to use than a 40-year-old desktop, like a 640×200 16-color LCD screen, and built-in interfaces that allow USB accessories and CompactFlash cards to interface with the ancient components (a 512MB CompactFlash card serves as the system's hard drive).

Intel's 8088 was a cut-down version of the original 8086 with an 8-bit data bus; in the Book 8088 and the IBM PC, it runs at a clock speed of 4.77 MHz. That slow speed and low memory limit means it's best suited to MS-DOS, with its text-based interface and general lack of multitasking support. You can run very early Windows versions on it, up to version 3.0 but, according to retro-tech YouTube, it seems like a bad time.