Hugo Hacker News

286 vs. 386SX

60654 2021-08-19 14:31:11 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> That’s why the 386SX had a pretty short shelf life. Once AMD had 386 chips to sell, Intel cut prices on 486s. But for a couple of years it served a purpose. And the chip lived on as a budget option for a couple of more years.

TBH that kind of a short shelf life wasn't just a 386 thing. Clocks speeds and architectures were advancing quickly, and all chips had a really short shelf life.

For example, in the span of 5 years (say '91-96) you could upgrade from a 386SX 16MHz to a 486DX 50MHz to a Pentium 90MHz, each time paying about the same amount of money but getting a 3x speed-up. And other components like video cards were improving just as quickly.

People were upgrading every couple of years because the difference between older and newer models was night and day. Imagine if in 2015 you bought an Intel i3 3GHz and this year you could buy an i7 15GHz with 8x the RAM for the same price.

brk 2021-08-19 14:39:30 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Around that time I was building "high end" PCs for friends and friends-of-friends. I remember the average price stayed around $2500, but the component availability iterated pretty quickly in terms of processor, HDD size/interface, graphics, standard RAM, etc.

A 2 year old PC felt woefully underpowered in that era, and a 4 year old PC was almost useless if you wanted to use any "current" software. You'd be out of drive space, unable to run a lot of programs/games, and limping along.

Now, my 8 year old Macbook Air is still more or less as functional and useful as it was when I got it.

labcomputer 2021-08-19 17:07:09 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> Now, my 8 year old Macbook Air is still more or less as functional and useful as it was when I got it.

This is my frustration with Apple's policy of dropping support for hardware in MacOS. It made sense in the 90's to upgrade every 2-3 years because you got 1.5-3x more performance each time. So 6 year old hardware was almost an order of magnitude less capable.

Fast-forwarding to today, a "legacy" 10 year old ("Mid-2011") MacBook Pro supports just as much memory (16GB) as Apple's current M1 offerings. The M1 does put up some very impressive numbers on the single-thread CPU front, but that's because we've gotten used to such small progress every year--it's only about 2x the speed of the 2011 MBP for single thread tasks.

SavantIdiot 2021-08-19 16:22:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> my 8 year old Macbook Air is still more or less as functional and useful as it was when I got it.

Right? I remember the enormous performance jumps from 286 to 386 to 486DX2 to Pentium to P6S...

Today, I'm still using a late 2013 MBP. Other than the lame 128GB of disk space, it is still my primary machine and is fine for everything I do. Most of my work is done in the cloud anyway so its essentially a 1970's dumb terminal.

farmerstan 2021-08-19 15:29:49 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I've been using my 2012 desktop without any discenible issues. The only thing I can't do is edit 4K video and for that I use my 2019 Macbook. I've been toying with the idea of upgrading my desktop but I have no compelling reason, and the idea of reinstalling all my applications (I'm still on Windows 7) makes it really unlikely. To be fair though, I don't play games on it.

aksss 2021-08-19 15:45:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

To some degree I imagine there’s also a question of how much demand we put on these modern old computers that reflects changing/diminishing interests as we age. There are certainly workloads available today that would cripple an 8 yo computer (Mac or PC), workloads that a younger version of you may have been more interested in (multiple VMs, gaming, real-time video processing at same time). You probably stressed your 386 to the breaking point within three years of buying it, and you could easily load up an 8yo computer today to its breaking point. My 2016-era laptop is no longer useful to me as, well, anything except an emergency backup.

If one can’t discern issues with a four-five yo computer, I would very humbly suggest it also says something about the demands of the owner stultifying to a degree.

otabdeveloper4 2021-08-19 15:48:15 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> and you could easily load up an 8yo computer today to its breaking point

I've seen people load up a 200 machine cluster on AWS doing quite mundane tasks.

Information complexity is the only physical quantity that doesn't obey conservation laws, so this kind of thing really isn't impressive or interesting.

aksss 2021-08-19 15:56:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Sorry, if you find an 8 yo computer as useful as the day you got it, it tells me more about your work habits than about technology.

lordnacho 2021-08-19 15:22:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I had exactly that 386SX as my first CPU ever, and I recall the incredible speed boost you'd get each time you upgraded. It was like magic, each time you or a friend got a new machine, everything would be so much faster.

Something similar happened with graphics cards, each new generation made stuff look that much better.

These days I can still use a 2013 Macbook to play MineCraft, doesn't feel any different. Compiling code probably is different, but most everyday things would not be much different.

Oh and of course an obvious question to go along with the whole 90s CPU story:

https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-incr...

aksss 2021-08-19 16:06:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You can still use a 286 to play King’s Quest, too. A 2013 Mac is in no way an adequate gaming machine in any sense of the idea. You couldn’t still use a 286 to play Falcon 3 or Comanche back when they were new, and you can’t use a 2013-gen tech stack to realize full potential of today’s games. The benchmark of playable Minecraft is not a suitable measure for capability, only a reflection of unchanging demands since 2013.

walrus01 2021-08-19 14:43:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There was a point in time where the absolute best dollars/performance ratio was the AMD 386DX/40, which ran circles around the Intel 386DX/25 and 386DX/33, but was priced the same or less.

And was considerably less expensive than a very top end ($2500-3500 in 1992-1994 dollars) desktop built with something like a Pentium 60 or 66 MHz.

Inflation calculator tells me that a $2500 desktop PC in 1993 would be the same as about $4700 today. For 4700 you could build a real beast of a machine.

Sohcahtoa82 2021-08-19 15:00:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> There was a point in time where the absolute best dollars/performance ratio was the AMD 386DX/40, which ran circles around the Intel 386DX/25 and 386DX/33, but was priced the same or less.

I remember when the best price/performance was a 300 Mhz Celeron A that you could overclock to 450 Mhz on an inexpensive A-bit BH6 motherboard. Paired with a 3dfx Banshee, and I remember being able to build a respectable gaming rig for under $600.

These days, $700 will barely get you a GPU, even at MSRP.

tssva 2021-08-19 16:48:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]

If you are going to compare what you can purchase today vs then, you should be comparing what you got for $600 vs what you can get for about $1000 today.

freefolks 2021-08-19 16:17:34 +0000 UTC [ - ]

AMD wasn't even in the picture at that time really. Meaning their marketshare of desktop pc's were so low that no one had them. Back in those days it was Intel vs Cyrix.

tssva 2021-08-19 16:46:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

AMD sold a ton of 386 and 486 processors and held much more market share than Cyrix. They were also very successful with their K6 and K6-2 Pentium competitor processors.

walrus01 2021-08-19 16:53:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

AMD absolutely was in the picture - they sold a ton of high-speed/low-cost 286 CPUs. In the mid and late 80s there was such a thing as a 286 12 MHz which sold for the same price as a much slower Intel part.

I'm referring to the whole time frame before the Cyrix 5x86 and similar were even a thing... There were plenty of AMD 286 and 386 CPUs sold in the early 1990s.

city41 2021-08-19 14:59:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Back then a new PC was so exciting because upon first boot you noticed it was significantly faster than the machine it replaced. I haven't experienced that from new computers in decades now.

kristiandupont 2021-08-19 15:15:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]

As well as harddisk space. The feeling of just taking the entire old disk and putting it in an "old hd" folder, taking up a tiny corner of the new disk was awesome!

phonon 2021-08-19 15:27:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Magnetic hard drive to SSD gave the same type of boost...

city41 2021-08-19 15:39:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Oh yeah, forgot about that one. Good call out.

woodruffw 2021-08-19 15:53:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I recently upgraded a computer built in ~2013 to one with 2019-2020 components. Maybe it's because I went from lower-middle tier components to upper-middle tier, but I noticed a very significant performance boost: my NVMe drive boots in seconds (versus ~1 minute with my SATA SSD), and I can build large Rust projects nearly instantly without breaking a sweat (my old AMD FX CPU would turn into a radiator).

lordnacho 2021-08-19 15:24:05 +0000 UTC [ - ]

This is part of why I'm going to rush to the Apple store the moment they announce an Apple silicon 16" MBP.

aksss 2021-08-19 16:13:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]

In decades? The switch from mechanical drives to SSDs didn’t offer any noticeable improvement? I don’t upgrade every year but moving from an 8th gen proc to 11th and back again presents a pretty stark contrast.

noneeeed 2021-08-19 15:57:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]

This was both awesome and frustrating. I remeber not being able to play networked games with friends at university because they had hardware that was a couple of years newer and the difference in performance and in what games we could run was immense.

fullstop 2021-08-19 15:39:59 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Cyrix was also in the 386 market.

javier10e6 2021-08-19 14:27:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I worked in the DELL Manufacturing plant in north Austin (Metric Blvd) on the 386->486 heydays. The DELL Optiplex 386SX will run around 800 to 1200 DLLS and came pre-installed with MD DOS 6.1 and Windows 3.1. When the 486 machines started churning out of the factory Windows 95 came to be and the PCs came pre loaded preloaded with a short action snippet of TOP-GUN and MS Encarta Encyclopedia so you could test your optional and expensive Sound Blaster 16 card. Our competition were Compaq and Packard Bell.

breck 2021-08-19 15:11:46 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> The DELL Optiplex 386SX will run around 800 to 1200 DLLS

Dumb question (maybe I've been out of Windows world too long) but what does this mean?

2021-08-19 16:10:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]

javier10e6 2021-08-19 16:15:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

he he. DLLS is short for DOLLAR$ :)

codazoda 2021-08-19 17:07:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Ha, ha. I also thought we were talking about Dynamically Loaded Libraries and I couldn't remember a time when Windows would show me how many DLLs I had loaded or stop me with, "Sorry, too many DLLs loaded". :P

quietbritishjim 2021-08-19 16:49:05 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I don't think that's a normal abbreviation. If you Google "DLLS" all the results are about DLLs (and that's obviously not because dollars are an obscure technical term). Maybe you were thinking of USD?

scns 2021-08-19 15:34:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Dynamically Loaded Libraries

JadeNB 2021-08-19 14:29:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> When the 486 machines started churning out of the factory Windows 95 came to be and the PCs came pre loaded preloaded with a short action snippet of TOP-GUN and MS Encarta Encyclopedia so you could test your optional and expensive Sound Blaster 16 card.

I remember the excitement when the SB meant my computer could play, e.g., human speech in my games—I forget what the games of that day were; one of the early Ultimas?—rather than just the beeps and boops of the PC speaker (although some people could do amazing things with that speaker!).

whoopdedo 2021-08-19 15:11:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Wing Commander 2 is responsible for putting the most SoundBlasters into pre-Win95 computers. And it wasn't just for the sound capabilities. The first generation of SB cards included a CD-ROM interface. Prior to ATAPI there was no standard way to put an optical drive in a PC. SoundBlaster put the sound and CD-ROM interface on one card it saved you having to buy extra hardware, and encouraged developers to use discs for distributing their software.

Eventually IDE/ATAPI drives became the norm, and I believe the SB16 dropped the proprietary CD-ROM.

aidenn0 2021-08-19 16:11:59 +0000 UTC [ - ]

My original (8-bit) Sound Blaster did not have a CD-ROM controller, but my first SB16 did.

guessbest 2021-08-19 14:44:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It was Doom. The era of the 386/486 still had a large component of "could it run doom"? And Doom on even an 8bit adlib/sound blaster clone on the ISA bus sounded amazing at the time.

herodoturtle 2021-08-19 14:47:55 +0000 UTC [ - ]

"YOUR SOUND CARD WORKS PERFECTLY"

Good memories :-)

AlisdairO 2021-08-19 15:00:11 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There was a nice easter egg in the installer there that i discovered. Much like how if you repeatedly click on one of your characters in the game they start to get annoyed, the sound card test did the same thing. "IT DOESN'T GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS"

christkv 2021-08-19 16:27:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Man I remember when I got the sound blaster 1.0 directly from Singapore it was amazing. Even had the gameblaster chips that worked with a handful of games. The next big card for me was the gravis ultrasound which was a must when you were into the whole demoscene in the late 90s.

jefflinwood 2021-08-19 14:13:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The first computer I built myself was a 386 SX/33 with 4 megs of RAM and VGA (I think). I couldn't afford a hard drive at first because I was a kid, so all i had was a 3.5 inch floppy drive. Had to buy a hard drive later, and if I had to guess, it was an 80 megabyte one. In the mean time, I could use a RAM drive.

Computer Shopper was such an amazing magazine to go through, and I would always try and find the best deal from the systems advertised, not that I had any real money. Usually it was from the ads in the back, not the big pretty Gateway ads in the front.

duncanawoods 2021-08-19 14:36:05 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> Computer Shopper was such an amazing magazine to go through

I really miss that type of advertising. I don't want advertising intruding on unrelated activities, ruining tools and destroying my neighbourhood with billboards.

But there are times I want to be sold to. I want 100 firms to show off what they have and extol their virtues in an easy to browse format.

Scoundreller 2021-08-19 14:19:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I miss how much money you could save by building yourself.

ansible 2021-08-19 14:24:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

In general, you can still save a lot of money, and have a higher quality end result by building your own desktop system, unless you want a really low-end machine. Well, this is not quite true these days, but if the blockchain madness abates, then GPU prices will fall back into reasonable levels.

aidenn0 2021-08-19 16:17:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I have not found that to be true at all. It's true if you go with a high-end custom pc builder, but you can often get a very respectable desktop prebuilt for less than the cost of equivalent components.

pjmlp 2021-08-19 14:39:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]

In Portugal that was never a thing back then, because the difference was minimal.

_nickwhite 2021-08-19 17:02:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The SX was always better. I owned an AMD 286 40MHz and my friend’s 386SX 33MHz outperformed it in every measurable way. My jealousy overflowed!

bityard 2021-08-19 14:30:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The 1990 through 2000 stand out to me as the biggest period of innovation and technical acceleration where it comes to PC. While the 80's certainly witnessed the birth and growth of the "personal computer", most of the computers in that decade were still 8086- and 8088-class machines, along with the barely-more-capable 80286 that didn't get popular until the late 80's.

But in the 90's we went from 286 and 386 class machines to the scorching-fast 750MHz AMD Athlon. It was very depressing to sink a few thousand dollars into a new mid-range system, only to see it worth about half that a year later. And a doorstop 3 years later.

Now we're back to the point where almost any computer you buy will do a good job for common tasks (i.e. not gaming and crypto mining) for at least 5 years or more. My current machine is a 7-year-old laptop and runs all modern software just fine. Unthinkable just a couple decades ago!

helge9210 2021-08-19 15:25:58 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Soviet Union had a technology of reverse engineering 286 chips by finely slicing them and looking at the implementation.

This didn't work on the 386 and it was the end of the CPU industry in USSR/Russia.

xanathar 2021-08-19 13:57:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I had a 286 12MHz and then upgraded to a 386sx 40Mhz (both manufactured by AMD, btw).

It was a HUGE upgrade.

First, 12Mhz to 40Mhz was an amazing upgrade, but that was definitely not the reason why I upgraded.

The real reason was *compatibilityé.

The 286 was compatible with close to nothing by the early 90's. Doom? Sure, runs slow on the 386sx, but on the 286? Does not run at all. And the same goes for all games and programs using one of: 1) 32 bit DOS extenders 2) EMS 3) any amount of XMS more than my 286 could handle 4) >600KB conventional memory, because there's only that much HIMEM.SYS can do 5) Windows 3.0 in 386-enhanced mode

nsxwolf 2021-08-19 14:09:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I had the exact upgrade path as you, except that my 286 12mhz was on an accelerator board inside my 4.77 MHz 8088 equipped IBM XT. So I got to be wowed by huge upgrades twice!

The 386 40 was my first "homebuilt" before I had ever heard the term.

bluedino 2021-08-19 16:20:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>> The 286 was compatible with close to nothing by the early 90's.

Wolf3D came out in 1992, it was the perfect companion for a 286. Same goes for Duke Nukem II in 1993.

fullstop 2021-08-19 15:44:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

My NEC 286 had a Turbo button to slow things down. I only remember having to use it for a few games which ran too quickly.

pjmlp 2021-08-19 14:37:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The first PC that I actually owned was a 386SX running at 20 MHz, 2 MB and a 20 MB hard disk that I would later use DR-DOS and MS-DOS disk compression drivers so that I could fit Windows 3.1 and Borland compilers for MS-DOS and Windows, ARJ/ZIP and Office.

Not much was left for documents, so I would "garbage collect" old stuff into floppies.

Still was quite useful for about 5 years, however being an SX meant that eventually I could not keep up with my favourite flight sims as they started asking for 386DX as minimum.

gscott 2021-08-19 16:51:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

If it was MFM you could get a RLL hard drive controller card and it would format to 40MB then add compression to that!

0x0 2021-08-19 14:42:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Your hard disk was probably 20 MB, not 20 GB :)

achairapart 2021-08-19 16:28:49 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Around that time my father generously dedicated to me a 7MB partition out of one of those 20MB hard disks. As a kid, I spent days and nights wondering and figuring out what to do or even how to fill that vast amount of disk space.

pjmlp 2021-08-19 15:11:22 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Fully correct, stupid me, thanks!

Was still on time to edit it.

aidenn0 2021-08-19 16:19:58 +0000 UTC [ - ]

My dad had a Toshiba laptop with a tiny ram drive. He ran pklite on all of the dos executables to clear up more space.

fullstop 2021-08-19 15:48:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]

We had STACKER, but not the hardware compression module. There were some legal actions between Stac and Microsoft, which eventually led Microsoft to "upgrade" DOS, but it just removed DoubleSpace.

It eventually returned after MS paid out.

aidenn0 2021-08-19 16:07:15 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> and the ability to use more memory, since most 286 boards topped out at 4MB or even 1MB, versus 16MB for a 386sx. Few people ever upgraded their 386SXs that far, but they liked having the option.

"Few people ever upgraded their 386SXs that far" is a bit of an understatement. In 1990 2MB of ram cost about the same as a 386DX CPU. By 1992 ram had dropped to about $50/MB, but the Am386DX and the 486SX, both of which blew the i386SX out of the water were generally available at this point and cost less than 4MB of ram.

One thing TFA doesn't mention is that the Am386SX (and SXL) had usage in battery powered applications for some time after this (not as common as today) due to their very thrifty power usage (with a fully static core, there was no lower limit on the clock-speed it could run at and it was lower power usage than Intel's SL when running at full speed).

shortformblog 2021-08-19 15:06:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I just got a hold of my childhood 386SX (not the exact machine, the same model) and I’m working on slowly, but surely, getting it set up. So it’s fascinating to learn new things about it like this. Great piece.

guerby 2021-08-19 14:43:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The first PC I had access to was a "French SMT-Goupil G4" with a 80186 inside:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80186

patchtopic 2021-08-19 14:04:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]

as an unemployed computer science graduate when this came out this CPU was a big deal to me. I had just finished a subject on MINIX and had read Linus original Linux post,and getting a cheap 386sx mobo allowed me to get into Linux for relatively low cost at the time by upgrading my 286.

InTheArena 2021-08-19 14:19:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]

My first computer/parents was a 386SX and a 20mb hard disk (almost all of my peers started w/ the Apple IIs, so I was late to this game). I begged by dad over and over to buy a 386DX, not a SX, but no luck on that.

There was something weird where windows wouldn't run in 386 protected mode. I was sure it was DX and SX, but this article has the assertion that protected mode worked with SX. I know my dad replaced the system, I assumed he updated the CPU, but maybe it was a bad mobo or something.

DIY computing to me will always be RLL/MFM hard disks with insane ribbon cables and IRQ toggles on ISA slots.

God, I am old.

ansible 2021-08-19 14:26:34 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Old enough to remember Plug-N-Play ISA cards? More like Plug-N-Pray... har har.

It was also a bit of an art back then to stuff as much of the needed TSRs and device drivers into the memory above 640K, to leave as much room as possible for applications.

gadders 2021-08-19 15:00:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Tweaking EMM386.exe and your config.sys and autoexec.bat..

fullstop 2021-08-19 15:49:49 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I kinda liked using 4dos and norton utilities to make menu trees to set specific parameters in config.sys and autoexec.bat based on what you were going to use the PC for that boot cycle.

ansible 2021-08-19 15:06:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yes. I remember being confused more than once about extended memory vs. expanded memory.

These days I'm dealing with an SoC company that has a dozen variants of the same processor, which have different combinations of four letters in the suffix in various combinations.

fullstop 2021-08-19 15:50:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Do you remember the graphical meters in Wolfenstein 3D which showed lower memory, EMS, and XMS before the game ran?

gadders 2021-08-19 15:18:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I used to do telephone support for Lotus 1-2-3 in that era. I've completely lost track of modern CPU naming conventions.

wazoox 2021-08-19 16:20:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I remember my Compaq 386SX 16Mhz with 2MB of RAM and 40MB hard drive. I played "UFO enemy unknown" a lot on it; the machine was so slow that at times the "Hidden enemy move" screen could stay up for a couple of minutes :)

dghughes 2021-08-19 14:16:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>Windows ran better on a 386DX or a 486 system, but those were expensive in the very early 1990s

I paid $3,500 for a 486DX2 66MHz around 1992/93 I can't imagine what a 486 would have cost in 1991.

walrus01 2021-08-19 14:47:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]

If I remember the Dell and competitor ads in PC Magazine from 1991 correctly, a decently specced 486 25 MHz was selling for around $4500-5000. With 14" SVGA monitor.

secabeen 2021-08-19 15:38:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

My memory is that the computer you wanted always cost 4-5k, but you could get a machine at 2-3k that was okay, but with lower performance.

incanus77 2021-08-19 15:56:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Last year, right after the pandemic started, I acquired a left-for-years portable 386SX-based computer which I took to restoring to working order. I blogged it up and had a ton of fun, kicking off my retrocomputing hobby (now up to six machines):

https://justinmiller.io/series/project-386/

h2odragon 2021-08-19 13:39:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> Cynically, I think there was one more reason. Intel had to license the 286 to other companies. They didn’t license the 386. I think they produced the 386SX to displace those second-source 286s.

The Harris 286 chips overclocked handily. The difference between 25Mhz and 40Mhz on a 286 was noticeable, too; except when anything hit the ISA bus which din't push much at all.

There were a few systems in that era with SRAM instead of DRAM; I always regretted not catching one. Helped someone track one down for their week long spreadsheet runs.

0x0 2021-08-19 14:45:05 +0000 UTC [ - ]

286 was limited to 16bit registers, the 386 had 32bit registers and could also enable a 4GB flat memory model. It enabled a completely different architecture and programming model, just like how the first amd64 with new 64bit registers enabled a whole different architecture.

colejohnson66 2021-08-19 15:09:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

What’s interesting about the 286/386 transition is: “Protected Mode” came about with the 286, but was still a 16 bit mode. (Random fact: the only way to return to “Real Mode” on a 286 was through a processor reset). The 386 changed Protected Mode into the 32 bit mode we know today. (And added the “Virtual 8086 Mode” for Real Mode programs)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_mode

vlowther 2021-08-19 16:25:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]

... and the fastest way to reset the processor was via a triple fault -- arrange for the general protection fault and the double fault handlers to both fail.

klodolph 2021-08-19 14:37:42 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Architecturally the 386 was a massive improvement over the 286. It had an MMU. You could run it in protected mode, run an operating system that would continue running after a program crashed.

The 286 technically also protected mode but it really sucked.

matja 2021-08-19 16:24:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The MMU was a sanity-saver even in DOS development using a DOS-extender like DOS4GW or CWSDPMI, where a crash could actually be debugged/output a stacktrace rather than instantly reboot the machine.

A fair-few DOS applications (via DPMI) also implemented virtual memory schemes like a "real OS" - I remember POVRay 2.0 officially requiring 2 MB of RAM, but was able to start on my 1MB 386SX machine (albeit with 1-2 mins of HDD-thrashing...).

bluedino 2021-08-19 16:24:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Sadly other low-end, crippled options like the Cyrix 486SLC took the 386SX's place.

Neil44 2021-08-19 14:23:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I am strainig my memory but I also think that the 386SX having the narrower memory bus meant less or no changes required from 286 motherboard designs, again making the overall system much cheaper.

hvs 2021-08-19 14:06:23 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I (or more accurately, my parents) were one of those that happened to buy a computer in that brief 286 window (specifically an IBM PS/1 Model 2011). My friend bought a 386 shortly after that and I had severe buyer's remorse on behalf of my parents. Still had a lot of fun (and learned to program in Turbo Pascal) on that old 286.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/1

luismedel 2021-08-19 14:14:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I had a model 2121. I still love the design.

_joel 2021-08-19 15:25:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Fond memories of my Dad's Compaq Presario 386sx (25 irrc) big hulking laptop with a top loading 1x CD-ROM. Those were the days!

scns 2021-08-19 15:41:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Got an 486 laptop from my grandpa when he didn't need it anymore. It had a 3.5" FDD, a monochrome display that blurred heavily on movement and a builtin trackball.

_joel 2021-08-19 15:53:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yea, first lappy I owned (personally) was an inherited 486. Remember having to build slackware disksets for it and spending an age trying to userstand X11 docs to get a DE up.

gtirloni 2021-08-19 14:34:42 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There were also 486SX's. I had a Compaq Presario 433 with a 483SX 33MHz CPU.

jabl 2021-08-19 15:23:36 +0000 UTC [ - ]

In the 486, the SX was also the low end version, but instead of having a narrower bus interface it lacked a FPU.

Lio 2021-08-19 15:47:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]

As I remember it, it was the same die for all 486s but the SX had the FPU disabled.

I'm sure this was done for marketing in some cases but I think Intel also worked out how to reclaim chips were the FPU was damaged as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80486SX

whoopdedo 2021-08-19 16:58:22 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Except in the case of the Cyrix 486s which had 80486-like instructions but in a 386 package. (Cyrix's business up until then was selling 387-compatible coprocessors, so perhaps there was some motivation to keep the demand for 386 motherboards up.)

monocasa 2021-08-19 16:49:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

And the 487 FPU chip for them was actually a 486DX that just disabled the 486SX.

300bps 2021-08-19 14:38:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I think of my first computer (Commodore 64) very fondly. The Commodore 128 less so and my first 8088 and 286 I mostly think of IRQ and config.sys hell.

I worked at a computer consulting company 1990-1991 and started my own company after that. Got very good at puzzling out how to jam as many ISA cards as my customers thought they needed into their computers. But I really think of that as the bad old days.

I remember getting computers on a network running SHGEN-1 and SHGEN-1 with Novell Netware 2.15 on 360k floppies on a 286. It took an hour for a single computer! I wouldn’t want to go back to that for anything.

ezconnect 2021-08-19 14:34:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I remember having this CPU and playing Mortal Kombat and envy my neighbor who had 486DX. If you are a programmer during the transition to 386 it got more interesting because of a lot of new CPU features.