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And there are specialized boards that still have ISA slots for specialized gear.

Without digging deeply at all, I found this: http://www.adek.com/ATX-motherboards.html. One of them has six serial ports, one ISA slot, a smattering of PCI and PCI Express, DDR3 RAM, and a socket 1155.

No doubt. And they've got a few with more than one ISA slot (I had 2 full-length ISA cards to insert). The software ran under MS-DOS, and the computer would never be used for anything other than the dedicated purpose, so PCI, DDR3, etc. was totally irrelevant.

So... we're going to take a random motherboard and find out how compatible it is with software provided by the manufacturer of those ISA boards in 1985? Does the software make use of direct access to the hardware of the computer that the vendor originally provided? Can it handle anything other than Hercules graphics? Who knows, the vendor wouldn't (or couldn't) tell me. No thank you.

The client wanted me to provide a new replacement computer. I declined, and fixed the old one. There's no way in hell that I want to provide something that might be considered a piece of medical equipment. I don't have a clue what the formal requirements for that are (beyond common sense), and don't have insurance that would cover my ass for that. Aside from not knowing if it would even work.

And there are specialized boards that still have ISA slots for specialized gear.

Without digging deeply at all, I found this: http://www.adek.com/ATX-motherboards.html. One of them has six serial ports, one ISA slot, a smattering of PCI and PCI Express, DDR3 RAM, and a socket 1155.

A place I used to work at had a couple machines built on Adek boards for running a few bits of equipment.

Ask and ye shall receive.

http://www.adek.com/ATX-motherboards.html [Adek Motherboards]

Not curious enough to send a RFQ, but maybe I'll be able to replace my old 486 that I've been using with my EPROM burner all these years. And, no, don't tell me about Willem burners... they suck.

Even better, you can still get motherboards with ISA slots on them...

You can, literally, buy a brand new Intel machine today and run DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 on it, unmodified, without emulation.

Theoretically, yes. Realistically, no. That new machine will not have proper hardware support for those operating systems: its sound card and network card will not be supported by either OS.

True, although you can work around this if you're careful. Buy a Core 2 Quad motherboard with ISA slots, and plug in a Soundblaster 16 and NE2000. Of course, this is already super overkill as DOS can't use four cores, but that's kind of my point -- at least it boots and runs after 25 years. There is literally no other consumer platform in history for which you can say this.

Windows will probably not be able to use its keyboard or mouse (assuming it is USB based as I have seen increasingly recently).

Amazingly, this is false. Most BIOSes that I've seen allow hardware-based PS/2 emulation of USB keyboards and mice (and, although you didn't mention it -- USB floppy drives too!). It's usually a BIOS option called "Legacy USB support" or something similar.

Graphics will be limited to VGA mode (either 640x480x16 colours or 320x240x256 colours) under Windows or any graphical DOS programs, because you won't be able to get a driver for it.

The graphics supported by such old software is inherently poor. This is not a huge limitation for the market of people interested in running such old programs. 640x480x16 was at one time considered high-end graphics.

It's also theoretically possible to run an old ARM OS on a modern ARM device. These people have made the OS designed for the original Acorn Archimedes (the first computer to use an ARM processor) work on ARM Cortex A8 devices. The major problem is device driver support for modern systems.

As the URL itself indicates, that's a port of RISC OS. It's not the original, unmodified binary. It uses the original ROM image, but that's hardly the same thing as running the original full OS binary.

ISA was released in 1981, was superseded by PCI 12 years later, and was commonly found on motherboards for several years after that.

And, curiously enough, can still be found today.

http://www.adek.com/ATX-motherboards.htm

There's still a few manufacturers making C2D boards with a limited number of ISA slots : http://www.adek.com/ATX-motherboards.htm and http://www.commell.com.tw/product/SBC/P4BWA.HTM are two examples.

Out of curiosity, I was looking for motherboards that still support ISA, and apparently there's still a market...

This ATX board I found, supporting C2Duo/C2Quad processors, has ISA, 4x serial, parallel, FDD, PS/2 mouse & keyboard, etc., in addition to dual gigabit Ethernet, RAID, SATA, PCI-Express x16, PCI, HD audio, DDR2, etc.

http://www.adek.com/PDF/MB-P4BWA.pdf