> 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Same here. The 386SX meant that I could afford to buy one just for screwing around with Linux (which at the time was very much a bare-bones ubergeek thing...).
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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):
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.
[+] [-] 60654|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lordnacho|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] city41|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] samstave|4 years ago|reply
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...)
---
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] User23|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/174/3
[+] [-] ubermonkey|4 years ago|reply
Three years later, I bought a 386/33 because the 286 was, by comparison, dog slow. And it cost less than the AT had.
[+] [-] noneeeed|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Agingcoder|4 years ago|reply
I don't think we get the same kind of performance gap in desktop pcs anymore.
[+] [-] fullstop|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jefflinwood|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bityard|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aksss|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] javier10e6|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xanathar|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
The 386 40 was my first "homebuilt" before I had ever heard the term.
[+] [-] bluedino|4 years ago|reply
Wolf3D came out in 1992, it was the perfect companion for a 286. Same goes for Duke Nukem II in 1993.
[+] [-] Narishma|4 years ago|reply
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..
[+] [-] fullstop|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helge9210|4 years ago|reply
This didn't work on the 386 and it was the end of the CPU industry in USSR/Russia.
[+] [-] 0x0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colejohnson66|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_mode
[+] [-] Sharlin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klodolph|4 years ago|reply
The 286 technically also protected mode but it really sucked.
[+] [-] zenron|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] h2odragon|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] patchtopic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pinko|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Turing_Machine|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 0x0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fullstop|4 years ago|reply
It eventually returned after MS paid out.
[+] [-] aidenn0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gscott|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guerby|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80186
[+] [-] aidenn0|4 years ago|reply
"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).
[+] [-] InTheArena|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 300bps|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shortformblog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dghughes|4 years ago|reply
I paid $3,500 for a 486DX2 66MHz around 1992/93 I can't imagine what a 486 would have cost in 1991.
[+] [-] incanus77|4 years ago|reply
https://justinmiller.io/series/project-386/
[+] [-] cronix|4 years ago|reply
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.