elks VS wrp

ELKS supported MMU-less operation on 8088 and 80286 machines, but I don't think an ARM port exists: https://github.com/ghaerr/elks

Roughly in the mid-90s I bought at a local surplus store a "Carry 1" industrial 8088 computer which to my surprise I later discovered it could run Linux (ELKS: https://github.com/ghaerr/elks). I ultimately sold it on Ebay because although it was a beautiful piece of old tech, I was struggling to find more space for other things.

Here's one. I had only the central unit, mine had two floppy drives.

I don't think you can replace the OS on these. Unless there is a way to boot them from DOS, but you are looking at 8c086 machine so the choice is limited. Linux or BSD won't work. But ELKS might if it can be made to boot from DOS. Minix 2.02 seems to work.

Yet ELKS works on 16 bit computers with 640k of RAM.

Some small size Linux-like OSes do exist though: one commenter suggested Lunix (which I didn't know, thanks for the link), and a slightly bigger one is ELKS which runs on old MMU-less x86 CPUs. I managed to run it on a 8088 industrial PC ages ago.

https://github.com/jbruchon/elks

I should have a Furby buried somewhere; now that I think of it, it may be the right platform to stick a bigger brain into, make it wireless so that it could be connected to the home IoT network then signal events or alerts.

https://github.com/tenox7/wrp allows you to use modern js as well, as long as you can render images

I use this for retrocomputing, in a way, to be very silly! tenox7's WRP [Web Rendering Proxy] basically runs headless Chrome and renders pages to gif/png/jpg and shoves them back at a client browser.

https://github.com/tenox7/wrp

Just like the PowerBook G3 Pismo I have, the iBook uses commonly available 18650 cells, so it's easy to rebuild the battery. With built-in AirPort antennas, you can add an AirPort card and get WiFi (has to be Wireless B though, and sometimes there are issues with encryption so you usually have to run an open access point to connect). Now this is the crazy part, but you can run Web Rendering Proxy on a Raspberry Pi or other, more powerful machine, then use an old browser like Internet Explorer to browse the web. It mostly works, and it's a pretty fun way to get some strange looks in the coffee shop.

Depending on what you're trying to do, you can use a "vintage" web browser and something like Web Rendering Proxy to make the page work.