Tao Te Ching You can get a reading from the Tao Te Ching each time you run this little program. (It starts with Chapter 1, and gives you the next chapter each time you come back.) It's a nice small program that doesn't use much disk or RAM, and it's absolutely free.

Melody Master takes you from DOS box to juke box, by playing numerically-coded (hence extremely small) music files through the plain old PC speaker. The program is still under development, and comes with dozens of songs loaded in, from Bach and classical to traditional and show tunes. Plus, by letting you write ordinary musical notation in the program, Melody Master allows you to enter additional scores, and even compose a brand new song on your beat old PC.

SkyGlobe puts a planetarium right on the screen of your 286, complete with the names of stars and planets, and lines tracing out the constellations. You can rotate the "overhead" sphere, zoom in and out, and enter a geographical location to shift to the view from that spot. SkyGlobe requires a 286, and EGA (?) graphics.

For even cooler bootup messages, get Picem, a nice little command-line image-viewer for DOS that displays image files in PIC, PCX, and GIF formats. Since practically every image-editing program handles GIF files, you can use one to make a custom image, copy the image file to your 286, and then add a line in your autoexec.bat file that has Picem display the image at bootup. Voila: custom Startup Screens just like the Macintosh! (I've only tried Picem on a 286 so far, so I'm not sure about 8088 support.)