Hmm, should 'calling them the 486DX' be 'calling them the 486SX'?
My memories of the 386 include..
.. the way that many of the first ones had a bug that made the Pentium division one look trivial: they couldn't do integer 32-bit multiply correctly!?! Intel sold them anyway as '16-bit' versions - I had a s/h PC from someone on cix with one - and Windows looked out for the bug, at least until Windows 3.x.
.. someone (Phil Katz of zip archive fame?) discovering that the reason their 32-bit code didn't work was that Novell's NetWare386 didn't bother to save the upper 16 bits of the registers it used. Any other program using 32-bit registers could/would get the upper half of the registers trashed at random.
.. the popularity with corner-cutting manufacturers of 'write through'-labelled 'cache RAM' chips that did absolutely nothing. Early Amstrad 386 systems had them, but they were far from the only ones.
The 486 motherboard I got from a Computer Shopper show stayed as the heart of my main PC for ages, having an Intel 486DX/33, at least one Cyrix clone, and at least one Am5x86 as its CPU over the years, ending up with 48 MB of RAM - 4x4MB 30 pin SIMMs and 4x8MB 72 pin SIMMS. I still have one of the later CPUs as a beard comb, but because of how the heatsink is attached, I'm not sure which one!
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2023-11-22 08:58 pm (UTC)My memories of the 386 include..
.. the way that many of the first ones had a bug that made the Pentium division one look trivial: they couldn't do integer 32-bit multiply correctly!?! Intel sold them anyway as '16-bit' versions - I had a s/h PC from someone on cix with one - and Windows looked out for the bug, at least until Windows 3.x.
.. someone (Phil Katz of zip archive fame?) discovering that the reason their 32-bit code didn't work was that Novell's NetWare386 didn't bother to save the upper 16 bits of the registers it used. Any other program using 32-bit registers could/would get the upper half of the registers trashed at random.
.. the popularity with corner-cutting manufacturers of 'write through'-labelled 'cache RAM' chips that did absolutely nothing. Early Amstrad 386 systems had them, but they were far from the only ones.
The 486 motherboard I got from a Computer Shopper show stayed as the heart of my main PC for ages, having an Intel 486DX/33, at least one Cyrix clone, and at least one Am5x86 as its CPU over the years, ending up with 48 MB of RAM - 4x4MB 30 pin SIMMs and 4x8MB 72 pin SIMMS. I still have one of the later CPUs as a beard comb, but because of how the heatsink is attached, I'm not sure which one!