
50-year-old hardware is slow, but rest assured, there are hobbyists out there trying to speed things up by building new era-appropriate accelerator cards. A prime example is @bradthx (Brad) on X, a computer scientist and lover of boating who has recently showcased their hardware multiplication ISA card accelerator for Intel 8086 and Intel 8088 PC systems.
I built a hardware multiplication accelerator for the 8086.It’s an ISA card built around a TRW MPY12HJ parallel multiplier from the 1980s that offloads MUL instructions from the CPU.It actually makes integer multiplication about 2.5× faster on early x86 systems.… pic.twitter.com/jddU7LheebApril 2, 2026