> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I strongly disagree, especially when running RAM-heavy applications where background tasks end up getting put in swap to make room for caches. For quite a while, there was actually an issue where the OOM-killer didn’t get triggered because swapping to the SSD was so fast that certain timers in the OOM system would never trigger. Instead of recognizing that the system has become completely unusable and killing off a process, it would just sit and thrash uncontrollably.
If I recall, Ubuntu 16.04 still suffered from this. And Android Studio could very reliably trigger this situation on my older/upgraded early i7/16GB RAM/SSD laptop. Hard power cycle to recover.
When I was preparing to emigrate in 2014, I put an SSD and a big HDD in my desktop-replacement laptop, and the transformation was a revelation. Ubuntu 14.04 went from booting in only a minute or so to booting in a single-digit number of seconds. It was astonishing.
> 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.
My i7 desktop from 2011 is still strong, but I was in the hospital ICU last year and promised myself I would build a zen 3 desktop. It's a bit more stable, and the pci-e v4 NVME storage is awesome, but otherwise it's pretty much the same experience. Games play about the same because I moved the same GPU over. The CPU bound softwares I tend to use are also single threaded, so the fact that I have 4x more cores doesn't change much other than let me run lots of processes. In practice, my ability to multitask is limited by UI bugs rather than raw compute power.
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.
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.
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.
My life doesn't revolve around games enough to do that, but I can tell you that running an IDE, a stack of VMs, driving external monitors, screensharing while on VC, along with misc productivity apps was not doable on my skylake laptop, whereas the same workload is easily doable on my tiger lake platform. How's that?
> eh, bullshit
Precisely what's bullshit? You're telling me that your workloads on modern computers are stressing them out and you simultaneously don't see a difference between a 6th gen platform and an 11th? No, you don't see a substantial difference in modern platforms because you don't have a need for the performance gains.
The single-thread performance of my 10-year-old Sandy Bridge is only now reaching the magic half-as-fast point relative to the fastest CPUs available. That's the point, historically, that's prompted me to upgrade.
For those whose workloads aren't multicore-intensive (or GPU-intensive, which is pretty much the same thing), it's been a dry, boring 10 years in the PC business.
> 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.
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'.
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:
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.
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.
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.
The point is that old hardware sucks if trying to facilitate modern software. Not the other way around. A 2013 anything (mac or pc) will be a poor performer with today's games.
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
"looking closely at the demo, we can see - as you can see on the screenshots - that the SSE version is less detailed than the non-SSE version (see the floor). Intel would it try to roll journalists in the flour?"
Two other examples from that link are SSE "optimized" Rage Software Expendables running slower than original, and "Pentium III optimized" PowerSlide by GT Interactive with zero fps difference. At least those two never released, unlike "Designed for Intel MMX" POD from 1997 with one optional audio filter added and 1/6 of the box covered by Intel marketing.
One has to wonder how much was Intel bribing for such blatant lies and manipulation back then.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Check out where the broadwell and haswell procs are on this plot relative to a 10th gen processor.
You probably couldn't spreadsheet faster on an 11th gen, but you could have more workbooks open, drive a couple large hi-res monitors, do VC with OBS in the middle, while screen sharing, while running several other apps, and add in a few VMs/containers and an IDE on an 11th gen platform (e.g. XPS 9310), all of which you absolutely could not do on a Broadwell or even Skylake platform - I've tried. It's all about what your workload/requirement is, right?
You're not wrong about there being substantive performance improvements in recent CPU generations, or that workloads matter.
However, the leaps in the 90's were great enough that you wouldn't have been able to run even the latest OS (or apps written for it) on mid-range 7-year-old hardware, at least not with any kind of comfort. I would have been almost outlandish to even try. Windows 95 should have theoretically run on a 386 from the early 90's, but I'm not sure it would have really been usable. In the late 80's you might have got a 286 -- not much luck running Windows 3.11 four or five years later on that. If you got a Pentium circa 1995, good luck running Windows XP or even Windows 2000 on it.
Looking at the charts in the Phoronix article, the overall performance (geometric mean) approximately doubled from Broadwell to 10th gen. That's more than I would have expected based on how incremental the generation-to-generation changes appear, and it's certainly substantial if your workload involves any kind of heavy lifting. However, in the 90's, performance would have doubled every couple of years or so. Within a time frame similar to Broadwell to 10th gen, it would probably have more than quadrupled.
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)
That's precisely my point. Having low requirements for hardware is a poor basis upon which to judge the advancement of hardware. If you don't notice a difference between a 6th gen and 11th(!) gen proc and associated platform (for which we have comparative benchmarks, btw), your demands of the hardware have just remained too low for the improvements to register. For a basic home user or low-intensity office user, an XPS 9310 with 32GB of RAM would be a waste today. For people that can use it, it's a godsend compared to a Haswell/Broadwell/Skylake laptop.
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.
Different topic, but okay. It's easy to multiply your pennies when you've only got two.
BTW, the first computer I personally owned was an 8086, so I was there, Gandalf. It's what I first learned to really program on. The timeframe you're talking about, the progression of tech through the nineties, I'm intimately familiar with.
Then you should be more than aware that current machines are not that special anymore. There is no "generation jump".
Raytracing? If we were comparing it to Quake I and GL/Glide, we are on the pre-Screamer days. Barely a step over Duke Nukem 3D.
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.
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
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.)
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?
> 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!).
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.
> 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).
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.
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"
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.
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.
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)
... 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.
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.
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...).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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
For me the big deal was that by 1991 the 386SX motherboards were enough cheaper than the 386DX ones that I could afford to buy one just to screw around with a new OS that some crazy Finnish dude had written, which would not run on the 286.
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
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 :)
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
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.
Whoops, typo, I had an AMD 386/40 and my friend’s 386/33 kicked its ass. I _did_ actually also have an AMD 286, but it was 13MHz & had a whole 1MB of RAM.
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.
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.
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.)
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.