The discussion on porting perl to MS-DOS led to the following comment:

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*requires* access to extended memory. There is approx. 300+ Kbytes of memory available ^^^^^^^^ Which means a 286, not a 386. If there are a lot of people out there on 8086 machines, sorry. People with that particular problem are going to have a hard time running most modern software, let alone Unix ports.

There's one part of the market that's still heavily populated with 8086 machines - portables. Especially cheap, lightweight portables, and palmtops like the HP95LX, which people might use to do their private email from, or carry around to exchange PGP keys with, or use as a smartcard for digicash and remote access to networks. Another part is DOS emulation running on real machines - I think lots of that is 8086-like. 640K RAM is a hard limit to live with, and sometimes you just can't do it, but it's nice if people don't *gratuitously* make their software not fit here. There's lots of real work that can still be done on them, and really patient people can even run Unix-like operating systems such as Minix. Bill Stewart