u/kaidomac

I wanted a small box for my gen2 RAG business project:

• Needed something compact & portable for onsite demonstrations
• Used an MS-01 for gen1 & upgraded to the MS-02 for gen2. Wanted drop-in hardware (with no mods). Really like the built-in PSU upgrade!
• HP sells a 18" ZBook Fury 18 G1i laptop with a 24GB RTX Pro 5000 for $8.3k & support for 256GB non-ECC RAM with quad drives, but only has a 2.5 GbE Ethernet port onboard. That config is ~$16.4k, which is about $5k more than the MS-02.

Hardware: (~$11.3k USD)

1. MINISFORUM MS-02 Ultra 285HX ($1160 Amazon B0G39HV95T)
2. 24GB RTX PRO 4000 SFF Blackwell ($2000 Amazon B0GRCM7GF5)
3. 2x Crucial 128GB (2X64GB) DDR5 SO-DIMM kit ($1388 x2 = $2776 Amazon B0DSQMKYLN). 256GB of RAM onboard is awesome, but the pricing has been heavily affected by the AI datacenter/war/tariff situations; CamelCamelCamel shows the lowest price point at $280 on August 30th, 2025. +$2.2k price hike
4. 4x 8TB NVMe (various models, ~$1330 x4 = $5320) for 32TB SSD available. Same deal here: the cheapest 8TB NVMe were ~$512 on March 6th, 2025. +$3.2k price hike. The memory & storage prices nearly doubled the total hardware cost of this project!

Notes:

• NVMe drives only fit without ANY kind heatsink. Curious to see how the thermals hold up over time. This will not be run 24/7/365 for production, so I'm not too worried about it. I do wish they offered PCIe gen5 NVMe support for higher speeds!
• The 24GB Blackwell variant offers 770 TOPS @ 70w, pretty insane! Haven't seen anyone successfully add a 2nd GPU into the NIC/NVMe storage card slot. n3rdware has a PRO 4000 Blackwell single-slot cooler coming out, which would be fun to upgrade the MS-01 with.
• Would have preferred ECC RAM, but the largest kit I've seen so far is NEMIX's 192GB (4x 48GB) ECC SO-DIMM kit ($3945). As this is a demo box, the higher memory capacity was preferred.

On a tangent, I've been having fun playing with old CP/M & DOS computers by using stock hardware to boot up to a Raspberry Pi mainframe emulator that can stream ChatGPT in real-time:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1sxr8xa/osborne_25_appears_in_the_wild_bonus_modern/

It blows my mind that the MS-02 has so much horsepower in such a tiny little box! A 45-year difference from the first "laptop" to what is essentially a turn-key AI supercomputer in shoebox format (~1,000 TOPS equivalent total, if we're being generous!). A comparison, just for haha's:

Component	MS-02 fully-spec'd	Osborne 1 (1981)
CPU	Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX (modern hybrid high-performance CPU)	Zilog Z80 @ 4 MHz
Architecture	64-bit x86 hybrid (P-cores + E-cores + NPU)	8-bit
Cores / Threads	16–24+ cores / 24–32 threads (hybrid design)	1 core / 1 thread
GPU	RTX PRO 4000 SFF (Blackwell workstation GPU)	None
GPU Memory	24GB GDDR7-class VRAM	N/A
System RAM	256GB DDR5 SO-DIMM	64KB RAM
RAM scale difference	~4 million × more memory	Baseline
Storage	32TB NVMe SSD (4 × 8TB)	Dual 5.25" floppy drives (~400KB–1.2MB total typical)
Storage scale difference	~30+ million × more storage	Baseline
Display	Modern 4K/8K multi-display capable system	5" monochrome CRT, 52×24 text
OS	Windows / Linux (64-bit modern OS)	CP/M 2.2
Networking	2× 25GbE SFP+, 1x 10GbE, 1x 2.5GbE RJ45, WiFi 7, BT 5.4	Serial connection (300–2400 baud)
AI / Compute capability	~1.0 Peta-TOPS class	None
Power usage	350w max	~37W max b(OK this wins lol)
Form factor	4.8L @ 7.6 pounds (8.7 × 8.9 × 3.8 inches)	33.5 liters @ 24.5 pounds (20.5 × 12.5 × 8 inches)

A better local-infra testbox solution for the money is a used HP Z8 G4 tower off eBay, which supports up to 3TB RAM, triple GPU's, dual Xeon chips, etc., but that is not so portable, haha!

Anyway, fun project! Literally took minutes to build!! Amazing what you can buy right off Amazon these days!!

Anyone wanna go halfsies?? hahaha

• They made around 11,000 units in 2 years
• "Portable" meant 24.5 pounds lol. No battery or hard drive, but had dual floppies!!
• 5-inch monochrome CRT display (52 columns × 24 lines of text)

Backstory (4 pages) on the first commercial laptop: (aka a "luggable")

• https://www.technologizer.com/2011/04/01/osborne-computer/

On a tangent, my current project: (WIP)

1. I discovered that ChatGPT is quite excellent at writing Z80 assembly code!
2. As I want to keep my own Osborne 1 stock, I had the chatbot whip up some code to use a floppy to boot into CP/M, auto-launch Kermit as the live-text terminal, and then dial into a Pi acting as a serial-accessible "mainframe": https://pastebin.com/sxn8B9Vq
3. So now I need to set up a Greaseweazle with a 5.25" floppy drive & source a working floppy lol

Then for the server:

1. Pi Zero 2 W stick running Pi OS Lite (working on a 3D-printed case to fit around the serial adapter hardware)
2. USB to serial adapter chain
3. DIY "FloppyClaw" interface (custom Python daemon acting as the "mainframe")

FloppyClaw is basically: (prompt: https://pastebin.com/UniUzkc6 )

• pyserial
• OpenClaw(ish), refactored for the hardware (loop agent)
• Voice chat (whisper.cpp + local Chatterbox-Turbo in a real-time voice loop tied into serial command flow)
• ChatGPT terminal streaming I/O + API key
• SmolLM 135M (for local, offline AI that is capable of creating plausible-sounding nonsense lol...just because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
• Retro CP/M interface (TUI animations, scanline effects, etc.) with a mainframe behavioral emulator (swappable VAX/BBS/CPM personality nodes)
• Tailscale worldwide SSH access
• Home Assistant control + token access (turn on the lights & play music from the 5" CRT!)

The performance metrics are hilarious:

System	Era	Performance
VAX-11/780	1977	~1 MIPS
IBM 370 (mid)	1980s	~1 to 10 MIPS
Osborne 1	1981	~0.5 MIPS (8-bit Z80 @ 4 MHz)
Pi Zero 2 W	2021	~4,000 to 6,000 MIPS

At max:

• The $35 Pi Z2W is 5,000 times faster per CPU core equivalent than a mainframe of that era
• The $35 Pi Z2W is 10,000 times faster than the Osborne (just 40 years later!)

This all kind of started because I was curious if I could run OpenClaw or an LLM via a floppy drive on actual old hardware. There have been some really neat advances like TinyClaw & turbo-quant stuff like Gemma 2 2B Q2_K lately!

The Osbourne 1 typically uses a single-threaded 4 MHz with Zilog Z80 with 64 KB RAM. There's no way to fit a real LLM or Agent on a floppy, but we can create the illusion of one using a 4-part compressed conversation engine!

1. Intent atlas
2. Phrase shards
3. Conversational memory
4. Self-writing dictionary

So basically:

1. RAM-based cognition
2. Floppy-based memory (using sync points every few interactions to flush the memory to disk, compact the learned rules, and rebuild the dictionary index)

Dual-boot:

1. Floppy 1: CP/M system disk (boot + tools)
2. Floppy 2: Chatbot intelligence + memory + learning system

There are a few ways to do dev work using emulators. The easiest way is to use RunCPM on the Pi with CP/M 2.2 using virtual disk images (with 8" style image, 128 to 256 byte sectors, ~90 KB capacity images, and the CP/M 2.2 filesystem layout). So that gave birth to:

• CPM-LLM

Reference code:

• Prompt
• Explanation
• Boot floppy
• Data floppy

Which really created a deterministic rule engine that simulates many cool things:

• Language understanding
• Memory
• Personality
• Learning
• Emotional drift
• Conversational continuity

Oddly enough, this uses less than 10% of what the Zilog Z80 is capable of! The OS, RAM, and floppy combination are the actual limiting factors! Because we already have:

• Simple token scanning
• Lookup tables
• Weighted intent scoring
• Template selection
• State flags
• Memory buffers

This created a very specific niche lol:

• "A stateful symbolic cognition emulator built on constrained 8-bit infrastructure"

I tinkered with the upper boundaries of symbolic NLP; this is as far as I pushed it:

• https://pastebin.com/qPKKzjm8

At that point, it made sense to externalize the inference infrastructure. As I had a Pi stick available, voila! Free pocket mainframe!! lol. So in the vein of "OpenClaw", "NanoClaw", "PicoClaw", etc. this became "FloppyClaw", haha! Which is cool because:

1. The Osborne 1 (unmodified) still boots on floppies
2. Still uses Kermit to dial into a mainframe
3. Can stream real-time ChatGPT locally! (or Claude, Gemini, or a local LLM)

Not bad for 45 years after launch!! This is such a fun concept! This guy did a similar project using a Pi 5 with local Gemma 4 on an 2000 Snow iMac running Mac OS 8.6 via a web CLI:

• https://www.youtube.com/@davidseamanonline/shorts

Next step is to convince my wife that this needs to live on as a functional display piece in our living room! Bonus voice chat for smarthome control!! Surprisingly, this only uses ~37 watts of power! (I priced it out at $4 a month in electricity costs in our area for always-on, 24/7 operation haha)