[HN Gopher] 286 vs. 386SX
___________________________________________________________________
286 vs. 386SX
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 135 points
Date : 2021-08-19 13:24 UTC (9 hours ago)
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| jgowdy wrote:
| I had a 386SX 16mhz Packard Bell, so I was able to run Windows
| 3.1 in 386 Enhanced Mode like a boss.
| hvs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I had a model 2121. I still love the design.
| zenron wrote:
| My 386SX 33mhz SMT was in a Victor 300SX which is a rebadge of
| the Tandy 1000 RSX that had the SMT 25mhz SX. Victor was sold by
| McDuff's, a subsidiary of Radio Shack.
|
| It barely ran the Doom demo but it did run. I ran OS/2 2.1 For
| Windows on it too at one point but eventually I build a home
| built Cyrix 486 DX40 that ran OS/2 Warp and Dos games like Doom
| at blistering speed.
|
| You couldn't run OS/2 2.1 on a 286 at all back then.
|
| I think the biggest issue of the 386SX was the data bus but I
| enjoyed my time with it. It is a bear to get modern storage to
| work with my Victor where as I see people with 286s on YT adding
| all sorts of modern goodies custom made for classic computers. It
| makes no sense why my Radioshack motherboard has problems with
| new modern tech and the 286s that I have seen don't but it may be
| due to bios issues. Atleast I had upgraded my 107mb hard disk in
| the Victor to a Maxtor 540mb drive and it worked with the
| software Maxtor had iirc though I lost the ability to play games
| if I was using MSDos at the time because it took too much HiMem.
|
| Those were the days. I really was stretched trying to get things
| running on that 386SX other than productivity software for
| Highschool...
|
| PS... My Highschool had IBM PS/2 Model 30's and 40's with
| Microchannel buses. So we couldn't sneak upgrading our PC lab
| computers with Joystick boards. At least we could learn Turbo
| Pascal.
| shortformblog wrote:
| 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.
| bityard wrote:
| 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!
| bluedino wrote:
| Some people don't realize the 286 came out in 1982, 386 in
| 1985, and 486 in 1989.
|
| The 386 was still being used up until Window 95 came out. It
| _could_ run on a 4MB 386 but anyone who did probably quickly
| upgraded to at the very least a 486 /66, which still struggled
| even with 8MB. You really needed a Pentium, or a 100MHz 486
| clone.
| midasuni wrote:
| Windows 95 really struggled on my 486sx/25 with 4mb. Upgraded
| to a p100 shortly after and that was fine.
| aksss wrote:
| Your 7 year old laptop does not run all modern software just
| fine. c'mon. It runs the software you feel comfortable asking
| it to run, but this whole comment board is suffused with people
| mistaking their stagnant demands for stagnant computing
| performance/software requirements.
|
| A 7-year old processor is somewhere around a haswell or
| broadwell, right? An i7 of that gen had a passmark score of
| like 950, whereas an i7 of current gen is about 1700. Even
| ignoring improvements in mobile graphics, power consumption,
| displays, and memory capacity, a modern laptop provides a
| completely different experience and level of capability than a
| 7-year old laptop.
|
| As I said in another comment that got voted down to hell and
| even flagged (for goodness sake) these comments about the
| adequacy of very old hardware probably tell us more about the
| owners' unchanging software tooling and work habits more than
| they convince us that technical advancement has come to a near
| standstill.
|
| WFH in 2020 required many people to add frequent VC on top of
| their normal workload. A 7 year old laptop would fully show its
| age if that normal workload was already pressing the laptop's
| boundaries. God help you if you wanted to add OBS into the mix.
| I can play an acceptable form of Assassin's Creed on my Tiger
| Lake laptop. I couldn't comfortably do that with my Skylake
| laptop. Examples and scenarios are legion. I'll use any
| resources I can get in a 13-14" mobile platform and then some.
| acomjean wrote:
| I think what people are saying is not that my computer is
| fast and getting a faster one wouldn't improve their
| experience that much.
|
| I have an old work laptop (6years) and a much newer Linux
| home laptop that is faster. I notice and it's nice to have
| the speed but Im not suffering with my old machine.
|
| We're a long way from watching a spreadsheet recalculate
| (AppleWorks on the Apple 2 Im thinking of you)..
|
| Sure for gaming/ music or video work or high end development
| tasks it makes a difference. It probably matters more than
| people think but they aren't suffering with older hardware.
|
| Some development platforms are looking to induce upgrades
| however (electron apps for example)
| anthk wrote:
| That's nothing. As I said, compare Doom (1993) vs Max Payne
| (2001).
|
| Or just a smaller gap. Doom (1993) vs Quake II (1997).
|
| Night and day.
|
| By comparison, kid, today you should be able to play a
| _FULLY_ raytraced new release of AC or Watch Dogs with crazy
| photo-realist graphics (superior to even Forza 5) at least at
| 1080p.
|
| Because that was the gap between a 1993 PC and a "Multimedia
| PC" with a Voodoo and MMX Pentium, if not a Pentium II which
| would curb-stomp the 486.
|
| Oh, and we are emulating the PSX with VGS from Connectix, so
| add PS4 emulation on top of that with a mid-range PC from
| today.
| toast0 wrote:
| > stagnant demands for stagnant computing
| performance/software requirements
|
| I'm going to do mostly the same thing, although I'll
| certainly acknowledge hardware has gotten faster and more
| power efficient. It's not nearly the same growth rate as
| before, of course.
|
| But, as a grumpy old person, I don't see a whole lot of
| change in what people are doing with their computers. Yeah, a
| new one would be more powerful and often use less energy, but
| would it change what I can do? Newer games are a real thing,
| but can I spreadsheet faster? Does it make chatting better or
| just enable more bloat? I used to send animated gifs to
| friends with AIM in the late 90s on a pentium 75, and the
| gifs were really animated gifs. Somehow, a modern chat client
| needs a quad core machine.
|
| Maybe more/different VC stuff, but I usually run VC on a
| haswell chromebook with 2 cores, so that doesn't seem hard.
| cronix wrote:
| 386sx 16mhz was my first (not family owned) personal computer
| that I received for college as a high school graduation present
| for software engineering. This was before having the internet in
| 1990. One of my favorite things that summer was, once I
| discovered Fractint, I loved making animated zooming fractal
| movies. It would take about 5-15 minutes to generate a single
| frame of julia at 640x480 resolution with my state of the art
| super cool video card with 512k of ram that could do 256 colors
| (most computers were still on 16 colors at the time). Then you'd
| zoom in a level and slightly move the viewport and render a new
| frame, and repeat for a few days. All manually. It took forever
| to make a clip even 5 seconds long.
|
| I saved up for the math coprocessor, and that thing was a game
| changer. It cut the processing times by at least half. I can
| really, really appreciate what a small, modern day cell phone is
| capable of in terms of compute and graphics power. Even smart
| watches are more powerful than my first computer.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| 386sx used to cause mountains of grief when compilers started to
| optimize for coprocessor. Tones of fun figuring out why a
| vendor's binary would suddenly crash or wouldnt start without any
| hints
| 60654 wrote:
| > 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.
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| chongli wrote:
| You can run King's Quest I-VII (and countless other classic
| adventure games) via SCUMMVM [1]. Falcon 3 and Comanche can
| be run via DOSBox [2]. That 2013 Mac can easily play almost
| any game from the DOS era using one of these two fantastic
| open source projects.
|
| [1] https://www.scummvm.org
|
| [2] https://www.dosbox.com
| Frondo wrote:
| Speaking as someone who _just_ upgraded from an early 2014
| MBA 11 " to a Air with the M1 chip, while the old machine
| always felt adequate to my uses, having used the M1 for a
| while now, I could never ever go back.
|
| Programs start much faster, quit much faster, web pages load
| much, much, much faster. Compiling is anywhere from 4x to 10x
| faster, as is interpreter startup time for scripts.
|
| Now, granted, it's a jump from one architecture to another
| and a time span of 7 years, but this upgrade felt magical the
| way the mid-90s hardware upgrades felt.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| 91-96, 386sx16 to pentium 90, that's exactly what I did. The
| difference was huge.
|
| I don't think we get the same kind of performance gap in
| desktop pcs anymore.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I miss those days :-).
|
| The original author missed that the 386SX had the memory
| addressing models that the 386 had in addition to the backward
| compatible 286 modes. So you could access your "Lotus eXtended
| Memory" much more quickly than you could on a 286 based DOS
| machine (aka the PC/AT). A lot of businesses that ran on large
| Lotus spreadsheets used the 'SX for just that reason.
| samstave wrote:
| uh.. I actually worked at intel in these times... and I used to
| have a cube adjacent to Andy Grove (for some reason, we were on
| the same bathroom schedule, and peed quite a bunch next to
| eachother)
|
| Anyway, my best friend and I ran the DRG game lab (developer
| relations group) - where we (intel) paid millions to gaming
| companies to optimize their games to the intel arch and things
| like SIMD instruction sets... we game tested (subjectively)
| games running on intel vs AMD machines... it was also the lab
| where we were able to prove that a subjectively performant PC
| could cost less than $1,000 === The Celeron Processor
|
| I was even the person who first sent an email (1997) to
| engineering asking why we couldnt stack multiple processors on
| top of one another....
|
| I later learned on a hike with a head of marketing that in the
| proc labs Intel had a 64-core test fab. (This was fucking 1998
| when that was revealed to me under NDA etc...)
|
| ---
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Yeah, getting 3 years out of a machine in 1990 was about all
| that was possible. I had an AT clone (so 286) that I took to
| college as a freshman in 1988, and had the fastest machine in
| the dorm by a SIGNIFICANT margin.
|
| Three years later, I bought a 386/33 because the 286 was, by
| comparison, dog slow. And it cost less than the AT had.
| User23 wrote:
| And then in '98 the famous Celeron 300A[1] came out, which
| could comfortably be overclocked to 450 MHz and remain rock
| solid stable with a cache running at the same clock. It was an
| incredible time to be a home computing enthusiast.
|
| [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/174/3
| brk wrote:
| 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.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| > 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.
| aksss wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Sorry, if you find an 8 yo computer as useful as the day
| you got it, it tells me more about work habits than about
| technology.
| mianos wrote:
| In real life, a few years ago, people at work fired up a
| 20 host cluster on AWS to do something that I later
| replaced with a script and GNU parallel (at the time a
| perl script), running on my 2013 Macbook pro i7, beating
| it by 10X.
|
| Sure, I'll admit it may not be fair to compare,
| considering the AWS host type, copying the data out and
| in, and all the other overhead.
|
| That said, the project sure looked like it was resume
| driven 'big data'.
| anthk wrote:
| Eh, bullshit. Go try running Max Payne from 2002 PC on a
| 486.
|
| Then, show me the equivalent of a 2015 game on par on the
| gap to a game from 2021 as a 486 game like Doom compared to
| a Pentium III game like Max Payne.
| farmerstan wrote:
| 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.
| labcomputer wrote:
| > 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.
| cronix wrote:
| > It made sense in the 90's to upgrade every 2-3 years
| because you got 1.5-3x more performance each time.
|
| You still get that level of performance increase. It's just
| that it's to the point of being imperceptible, or
| invisible, to the vast majority of users. The only ones who
| really notice are the ones really pushing the machines with
| things like 3d rendering, 12k video production, and high
| end audio (I can run 80 plugins now where I could only run
| 70 before!).
|
| Texting? Doesn't matter how fast your machine gets, you
| won't notice. It will perceivably perform just as good as a
| phone that texted 20 years ago. You can run benchmarks and
| see, oh yeah, this is faster, but it's not noticeably
| faster to your human inputs.
|
| In the days of 300 baud modems, they were so slow you could
| actually read text as it was sent over the line, as if
| someone was just a very fast typist and you were watching
| them. Now, you get full multiple pages of text with videos
| that pop up almost instantaneously. Once we got to 1200
| baud, it was too fast to read as it was coming over the
| line. You couldn't catch up. Ever since that threshold was
| crossed, it doesn't matter how fast speeds get, they're all
| faster than the human brain can absorb so they are
| basically the same in our minds.
| pomian wrote:
| Except for the web. Which seems to get slower and slower
| due to bloat and overload, no matter your computer or
| internet speed.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Yeah, it's great, but it's also less fun.
|
| Our 9-year-old Air went to live with friends who suddenly
| needed another computer (for their kid) at the beginning of
| COVID. It still works fine, though some sites are slow.
|
| Sure, APPLE isn't releasing updates for it anymore, but that
| doesn't actually affect whether or not Word runs, or
| whatever.
|
| I'll also say that biggest and most dramatic upgrade I ever
| had was moving from a 1988 AT clone to a 1991 386/33 (Gateway
| 2000, baby). We'd pick a directory with loads of files in it
| and do a dir just to watch it scroll by so insanely fast.
| Simpler times for sure.
|
| The next most impressive upgrade I ever had was about 10
| years ago. I had a 2010-era Macbook Pro (early Intel) that
| shipped with a spinning drive, back before everything was
| SSD. At some point in its life -- it was ultimately stolen in
| 2012, so call it 2011 -- I swapped the spinner for an SSD and
| OH MY GOD THE DIFFERENCE.
|
| No other machine upgrade in my 30 years of computing has come
| close to the "holy shit!" moments of these two. I wonder if
| my ultimate shift to Apple Silicon will bring some of that --
| I hear good things, so I hope so.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > I swapped the spinner for an SSD and OH MY GOD THE
| DIFFERENCE.
|
| FWIW, that difference isn't nearly as noticeable under
| Linux. It's so lightweight on RAM and so good at caching
| frequently-accessed data that it can be incredibly snappy
| even when using spinning rust. SSDs mostly speed up your
| boot process and the rare IO-heavy workload. Though it
| wasn't until the late 2000s-early 2010s that RAM began to
| be truly abundant on out-of-the-box configs, and that was
| the same timeframe as the switch to SSD's.
| city41 wrote:
| 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.
| lordnacho wrote:
| This is part of why I'm going to rush to the Apple store the
| moment they announce an Apple silicon 16" MBP.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| On a 386, MS Word would make you sit around for 10-15 seconds
| looking at the splash screen. Then when you upgraded to a
| 486, you opened Word and it was like "bing!", you're up and
| running.
|
| Now with magnitudes more speed and memory available, loading
| Word is...somewhere in between.
| phonon wrote:
| Magnetic hard drive to SSD gave the same type of boost...
| city41 wrote:
| Oh yeah, forgot about that one. Good call out.
| woodruffw wrote:
| 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).
| aksss wrote:
| 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.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| 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!
| walrus01 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| The AMD 5x86/133 was a similar kind of situation. Drop one of
| those into a decent 486 board w/ some L2 cache and you got
| better than 75Mhz Pentium performance at a ridiculously low
| price point as compared to a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.
| noir_lord wrote:
| And again with the Athlon XP1800+ then Opteron.
|
| AMD has had moments where it really stuck it to intel but
| always fell back to 2nd, I hope this time it sticks.
|
| x86 vendors duking it out while Apple keeps both honest
| isn't a bad market for a buyer.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| walrus01 wrote:
| In the around 1000 dollar point today, if you set the
| design constraint to 1080p gaming, you can do quite a lot
| with a $175 CPU in a $145 motherboard, add maybe another
| $150 of RAM, and a $100 NVME SSD. The problem is the
| video card availability and marketing pricing.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Fair enough, I suppose, but seeing as it's over 20 years
| ago, I'm having a hard time deciding where those parts
| would fit. I figured those were all mid-grade parts, and
| today, a mid-grade GPU would be an RTX 3070 which has an
| MSRP of $500-600 depending on the brand, and a midgrade
| CPU (like a current gen Ryzen 5) will be nearly $300,
| that doesn't give you much left for the motherboard, RAM,
| storage, etc...
| freefolks wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| tssva wrote:
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| AMD sold lots of K6 and Athlons.
| walrus01 wrote:
| 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.
| noneeeed wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Cyrix was also in the 386 market.
| midasuni wrote:
| Quake killed Cyrix - much of the grunt of quake was written
| in hand coded assembler optimised for the pentium.
| _joel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bluedino wrote:
| Sadly other low-end, crippled options like the Cyrix 486SLC took
| the 386SX's place.
| helge9210 wrote:
| 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.
| _nickwhite wrote:
| 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!
| Narishma wrote:
| There was no 40MHz 286. It maxed out at 12MHz (Intel), 20MHz
| (AMD) or 25MHz (Harris).
| ezconnect wrote:
| 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > 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).
| kazinator wrote:
| I coded some 3D demos using DJGPP on a 386/SX laptop that had two
| megs of RAM. :)
| gtirloni wrote:
| There were also 486SX's. I had a Compaq Presario 433 with a 483SX
| 33MHz CPU.
| jabl wrote:
| In the 486, the SX was also the low end version, but instead of
| having a narrower bus interface it lacked a FPU.
| Lio wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And the 487 FPU chip for them was actually a 486DX that just
| disabled the 486SX.
| jefflinwood wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I miss how much money you could save by building yourself.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In Portugal that was never a thing back then, because the
| difference was minimal.
| ansible wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ansible wrote:
| I guess it also matters what we define as a prebuilt.
| Some prebuilts are just standard components assembled
| (hopefully competently).
|
| Some prebuilts, especially from Dell, HP, Acer and Lenovo
| will have custom motherboards, custom power supplies and
| custom cases that can't be re-used later on. Those
| usually have the very crappiest cooling solutions too. So
| they will end up costing you more money down the road,
| because you can't incrementally upgrade the pieces as
| much as you could with a self-built PC.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| fullstop wrote:
| 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.
| gscott wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Your hard disk was probably 20 MB, not 20 GB :)
| achairapart wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Fully correct, stupid me, thanks!
|
| Was still on time to edit it.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 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.
| klodolph wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...).
| dghughes wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Definitely, at that point in time there was no such thing
| as a 486SX, and the 486 was very new. The typical
| economically pried home desktop PC would be something more
| like a 386SX/20.
| 300bps wrote:
| 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.
| scns wrote:
| Used our C128 only for its Word equivalent, the rest of the
| time it ran "downgraded" in C64 mode.
| xanathar wrote:
| 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 *compatibilitye.
|
| 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
| fullstop wrote:
| 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.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| 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.
| Narishma wrote:
| Doom came out much later in 1994. Wolfenstein 3d and a ton of
| other games worked fine on a high speed 286.
|
| EMS also works fine, heck it even works fine on an 8088. What
| doesn't work are things like EMM386 that emulate EMS using
| extended memory.
|
| The 286 supported up to 16MB of XMS and if you could afford
| that much RAM, you probably could afford a 386 or 486 CPU..
| bluedino wrote:
| >> 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.
| chungy wrote:
| Interesting content, but light gray text on white is a poor
| choice for a website :(
| InTheArena wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Tweaking EMM386.exe and your config.sys and autoexec.bat..
| ansible wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do you remember the graphical meters in Wolfenstein 3D
| which showed lower memory, EMS, and XMS before the game
| ran?
| scns wrote:
| Never saw those! My favourite mememory from that that
| game is when you open that door to the first bossfight,
| behind it waiting is huge guy with gatling guns instead
| of arms saying: "Guten Tag" befoee he start shooting.
| fullstop wrote:
| It was right as you started the game -- it looked like
| this: https://i.imgur.com/yjWksNt.png
| gadders wrote:
| I used to do telephone support for Lotus 1-2-3 in that
| era. I've completely lost track of modern CPU naming
| conventions.
| fullstop wrote:
| 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.
| alberth wrote:
| I have found memories of my first personal PC.
|
| A Packard Bell 486DX2 66Mhz.
| collaborative wrote:
| I think that in terms of speed and performance we've hit a
| plateau but there is still room for improving physical space
|
| I imagine that our hand held devices will at some point replace
| our desktops alltogether, allowing plug and play wireless
| connections to our monitors, etc and letting us run the most
| advanced software & games directly on the same devices we
| currently use to text and make phone calls. But we're not there
| yet
| incanus77 wrote:
| 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/
| guerby wrote:
| The first PC I had access to was a "French SMT-Goupil G4" with a
| 80186 inside:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80186
| tapatio wrote:
| You sure this sweet machine is not going to waste?
| Neil44 wrote:
| 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.
| h2odragon wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| ... 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yeah, from a programmer's perspective the difference is vast.
| From a regular user's perspective, not so much.
| yazantapuz wrote:
| This bring me some fond memories from my childhood. My family had
| a 386SX-33 (an AMD clone). One of my best friend a 286 (Intel).
| He always told me that my computer feel slugish to him. Decades
| later at college I finally understood why :D
| patchtopic wrote:
| 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.
| pinko wrote:
| Same. I ran Linux 0.12 on my 386sx 16mhz in my dorm and it
| changed my life (literally).
| hansor wrote:
| Woth to know that NetBSD(up to 4.0 ?) and Linux up to kernel
| 2.4(?) can work on 386SX with 4 MB of RAM.
|
| It's intresting that for some reason before ~2002 it was possible
| to run Linux(up to 2.0?) and NetBSD (for sure 1.6.1) at just 2MB
| of RAM.
|
| For some reason most modern operating systems requires 4MB of ram
| - even if kernel size is far less (like 700kb), as there is
| SOMETHING hardcoded in the kernel to prevent boot under 4MB of
| RAM. I think this could be due the "large memory pages" switch
| from 4kb to 4MB - but I never found anyone knowledge enough to
| confirm it :(
|
| Anyone?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26979499
| anthk wrote:
| Graphics buffers and kernel drivers. But NetBSD can be slimmed
| down in a really hard way. You just build the devices for your
| hardware and nothing more.
| javier10e6 wrote:
| 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.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > 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!).
| herodoturtle wrote:
| "YOUR SOUND CARD WORKS PERFECTLY"
|
| Good memories :-)
| AlisdairO wrote:
| 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"
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Ah yes I'd forgotten about that.
|
| Thanks for sparking a fond memory ^_^
|
| CONFIG.SYS be damned!
| christkv wrote:
| 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.
| inDigiNeous wrote:
| I remember seeing the box for Sound Blaster 2.0 at a
| friends house and just looking at it felt magical at the
| time. And those soap box speakers powered by batteries, you
| just can't replicate that sound on modern systems and their
| fancypants speakers and soundchips.
|
| GUS was definitely a game changer for me also, I can still
| remember how much cleaner and yet at the same time warmer
| the sounds outputted by GUS were when used correctly.
|
| At that time these chips and cards still had their
| signature sounds, kinda missing this period in a way.
| whoopdedo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| My original (8-bit) Sound Blaster did not have a CD-ROM
| controller, but my first SB16 did.
| timoth wrote:
| > 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!).
|
| They certainly could do amazing things with that speaker. I
| remember being blown away when I loaded up a PCPlus magazine
| "superdisk" cover disk some time in the early nineties IIRC
| and speech came out of the PC speaker -- "Welcome to
| SuperDisk 61" (or whatever number it was).
| guessbest wrote:
| 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.
| breck wrote:
| > 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?
| [deleted]
| scns wrote:
| Dynamically Loaded Libraries
| javier10e6 wrote:
| he he. DLLS is short for DOLLAR$ :)
| codazoda wrote:
| 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
| 0xabe wrote:
| Unlike extensions on Macintosh that showed up on the
| start up screen as they loaded!
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| 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?
| Frondo wrote:
| What language is that? The only abbreviation I've ever seen
| is USD (the three non-romance languages I speak a little of
| use a variation on "dollar" which, by context, is always
| clearly USD.)
| wazoox wrote:
| 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 :)
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(page generated 2021-08-19 23:01 UTC)