As microcontrollers become faster, they can emulate increasingly powerful CPUs, opening up the possibility of emulating productivity machines from the past and running the vintage software libraries associated with them.
For example, a Raspberry Pi Pico has been used by a developer to create a 286 PC emulator named pico-286, enabling MS-DOS to run on a Pi Pico.
With many useful software programs still available for MS-DOS, the emergence of these kinds of emulations could offer an appealing route to revive and make use of them via a handheld DOS PC.
Moreover, a comment in the Hackaday article suggests that it may be possible to emulate later OSs on the 80286, such as OS/2 1.x or later versions of DOS.
However, the viability of these options would depend on the level of x86 emulation faithfully reproduced in the pico-286 software.
