Sometimes I really forget how *insanely slow* XT machines were back in the day... just ran it on my Schneider Euro PC. The machine is slightly beefed up, i.e., it has an XT CF IDE adapter, 640 KBs (instead of 512 KB stock), a VGA graphics card, a MPU-401 and Adlib clone sound card in a neat little external DIY industrial ISA backplane to the left, powered by my custom power supply. Needless to say, none of these cards make the machine any faster, but far more practical and fun to use (e.g., file exchange is a matter of putting files on the CF card).

And, what can I tell you... it only takes seconds with DOSbox to train the perceptron with 20 hidden units on 4 patterns for 100 epochs, but on the Euro PC it takes more than 5 minutes for 2 patterns with 5 hidden units for 50 epochs. Insanely slow. I forgot HOW slow these machines were (and I didn't even run DOSbox at a higher "frame rate" - just default settings). Wow. I guess an 8087 Co-Processor would have helped a lot! And indeed, the 2nd revision of the Euro PC came with one, as well as full 640 KBs (and who would ever need more than that...)

Anyhow, it's definitely nice to see this 31 years old program on an even older piece of hardware running (Schneider Euro PC ~ 1988), and to have my Modula-2 compiler back! Nothing better than the real deal.