The words you’re reading are time travelers.

They were written on a laptop that is technically brand new, in the sense that it was only released recently. But everything from the word processor this text was written in to the CPU that ran it is decades old.

I am writing this on the Book 8088, an utterly bizarre $200-ish imported system that uses a processor from 1984, a custom motherboard design, and a bunch of cobbled-together parts to approximate the specs of the original IBM PC 5150 from 1981. It’s running at a blazing-fast speed of 4.77 MHz, at least when it’s not in TURBO MODE, and it has a generous helping of 640KB (yes, kilobytes) of system memory. (If you can’t buy one now, keep an eye on the listing because it has blinked into and out of stock a few times over the last few weeks).

This is a weird computer, even by the standards of all the other weird computers I’ve gotten my hands on. Its keyboard is cramped, it comes with a stolen BIOS and stolen software, and everything is always just slow, slow, slow. Its speakers keep crackling unhappily at me for no readily apparent reason. Its tiny, low-resolution LCD screen is hopelessly dim.

Tech support is supplied by the AliExpress seller in China, with both sides relying on automated translation to bridge the language gap. And I do need a little tech support because the system isn’t quite working as promised, and the hardware that is working mostly isn’t configured optimally.

And yet! The Book 8088 remains an interesting technological achievement, a genuine IBM PC compatible that shares a lot in common with my first ancient, terrible personal computer. I’m not sure it’s a good buy, even for retro-tech die-hards who eat and breathe this sort of thing. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been a ton of fun to explore.

In this article, we’ll mainly be looking at the hardware of the Book 8088, including its historical roots and what it has been like to get it up and running. In part two, we’ll take a deeper dive into vintage and modern