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486 Turns 15 Years Old
wooby writes "The 486 processor , introduced in 1989 at 25 and 33MHz clock speeds, is now 15 years old. Intel's simultaneous launch of both the 486, a CISC chip, and the i860, a RISC chip, was a gamble. Remarks Intel's former CEO, Andy Grove: 'our equivocation caused our customers to wonder what Intel really stood for, the 486 or i860?'"
I still remember my first 486 based machine. It had everything! :)
Soundcard, 256K videocard.
I was the king of the block.
Those where good times
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
Hehe . . . yeah, the i860. Sure did a lot of crazy stuff. Some random pictures http://i860.sourceforge.net/gallery/
Including some AVS stuff and an i860 workstation. Man, was it ever a sucky processor.
I still fondly remember my first experience with a 486. What was it? Watching a bad BSA propaganda video clip entitled "Don't copy that floppy." Sounds kinda dirty now but at the time the fact that I was watching real motion video on a PC screen was enough to make me forget the source.
My very 1st machine was an Acer 486/66 dx2 with 4 megs of ram and a 500 gig hd. I was about 12 at the time and the king of Dos :). Is it just me or were the games back then a lot more fun than they are now? I remember playing Doom, Leisure Suit larries, crystal caves, etc.
The old cane-waving cynic in me says everyone who uses a computer nowadays should have a 486 level machine (or something near to it) to do some common task. Give people a real appreciation of what hardware is capable of & where their systems today relate.
Young kids now think 1GHz isn't enough to browse web & email. That's not just wrong, it ends up wasteful
*returns to cane waving*
A better mousetrap is a term used to reflect a certain phase in a life of product-type. It basicly means that the product has been developed to a point where it fullfills its purpose with ease and all further improvements become unnecessary and unprofitable. When it comes to IT, I would say that applications like word processors and beginning to fall in the better mousetrap -gategory. Many people I know use word97 for example. Perhaps the OS/GUIs are experiensing the same thing. With CPUs it seems to be a different story tho. Both intel and AMD are pulling nice profits and both the sales volume and speed of CPUs is increasing at a rapid pace. I wonder how much CPU power would be enough to make further improvements unattractive to buyers. I would bet we are talking about multi-core quantum (or whatever shall be) cpus with the mainmemory on-die.
Or at least the one I had was. In a failed attempt to install a faster cyrix chip, I managed to bend the pins of my SX/33 significantly, and then bend them back with my finger(ah, those were the days, when I ordered my p4 through the mail a few years ago, it was delivered with a bent pin, and it took me about an hour wiht a pair of tweezers to bend it back), and I dropped it on the shag carpeting in my house, got a pin stuck, and just ripped it right out, no problem :P
Though my friend managed to cook one by plugging it in backwards, he said the chip glowed red. And after it was cooled back down a small chunk just fell off.
I'm not sure if the i860 was the failure that everyone is saying it was. This may be true on the desktop, but it was a fairly popular processor in the embedded world for offloading computation.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
Well, given the problems that people had getting general workloads to run on the i860, probably almost nowhere...
But this always raises the question of what the world might have looked like if intel had dropped the ball and forced the PC world to abandon the x86 world in favor of another architecture. Given the time frame, the other architecture would almost certainly have been RISC. Who would have won, and why? And how would the world look now if we had the descendents of the MC86000, Sparc, or MIPS R3000?
Such a pleasant dream for such a pleasant Saturday...
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
the i960 (dont know if its related to the i860 or not) was seen in several arcade machines (specificly the Sega Model 2 hardware that powered classics like Daytona USA and so on)
I still have a 486SX-25MHz, you insensitive clod!
And it still works too! Woot! One of the things I've noticed is that the user interface really hasn't changed all that much since Win3.1 (or MacOS) was introduced, particularly the speed of interaction. It takes as long for me to perform a task (say, create and print a letter) on that 486 with Win3.1 as it takes me on a 1.7GHZ P4 with Fedora Core 2. Sure, stuff looks nicer and there's a ton more features. But it really hasn't gotten any faster to perform the everyday mundane tasks.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
for the price of those machines back then, I'll take my sub $1000 pc anytime. Ok, so I am just jealous because I never could afford a $2500 486, but I sure did want one. I bought every issue of PC Shopper just to look at the specs!
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
i960 is even today the processor of choice for a lot of RAID controllers.
I'm sitting here looking at one right now -- and in my garage there are 150 Fibre Channel SSA RAID cards from an enterprise storage cabinet, each with 2-4 i960 chips per card.
I would feel that the release of the 386 was much more significant of a technology release then the 468.
I mean really, the 486 was just an overblown 386 anyway, it wasn't a true 'advancement' like it was from the 286...
Or i suppose anytime we jump to a wider word....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Actually, the i860 was a graphics chip.
Not really. It certainly did have some nice graphics stuff built in, but I can clearly remember Intel marketing it as "A Supercomputer On a Chip". Intel also made a series of boxes called the ISPC 860 supercomputer containing arrays of i860's and sold it as, guess what, a supercomputer.
As primarily an assembly language programmer, I'm not that fond of RISC processors, but looking at the i860, it seems quite nice compared to a MIPS or ARM.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
yeah, i still remember my 486. my first pc was the XT, then went to some 386, which was nice, but the 486, oh !!! to me the 486 still resembles my favorite pc of all time, it was quick (was a dx2/66 i think) text based apps in dos, was stable, and it was fun screwing with it to optimize memory usage... I think that's why I still have this affinity towards text based apps, for their stability and speed, which has it's origin with the 486 apps...thus linux/bsd! Hmm, wonder if I have that old thing lying around somewhere...
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Our 486 had 16MB of ram, which I thought was bordering on absurd at the time. I didn't know anyone else with more than 4MB. But when time came to do a video for a class project, I did all the sound editing on that thing. For the 7-minute video, we had about 9MB of audio, and so I was able to edit it effortlessly with the Sound Blaster software.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Most of the LaserJet 4 line of printers runs on i960s.
Oy!
Don't take that 'pcmech' website the article links to very seriously. It's an interesting read, but contains so much stuff that is downright *wrong* as to be good for a laugh.
"Despite this, the 186 never found itself in a personal computer."
Bullshit. I owned one. Made by PCTech. Yes, the same one that made the buggy IDE chipset we all know from our kernel configuration sessions. Ironic in that the 186 motherboard they made had onboard SCSI. Quite the piece of work for ~1987.
"The 286 was the first 'real' processor."
Ummmmmmmm...Whatever you say.
"it could not switch back to real mode without a warm reboot."
Bullshit. I guess exiting Windows 3x on a 286 and going back to that DOS prompt was a figment of my imagination.
That's only halfway down the first page. It only gets worse.
Young kids now think 1GHz isn't enough to browse web & email. That's not just wrong, it ends up wasteful
It is wasteful, for two reasons: 1) the newer processors consume more power plus the multitude of fans needed to cool the thing. 2) there are millions of 386 and 486 machines still functioning out there. its wasteful to build a new 2GHz machine when a 486 can do the same task.
Plus those 'old' computers are a lot more durable than ones made today. The old XT keyboards were made from steel. Even into the late 1980s, IBM keyboards still had a steel plate underneath. The IBM PS/2s had steel cases, you could use the case in place of cinder blocks to raise up your car.
My parents had a Hayes1200 modem that they discarded. It had a milled aluminum case. Being a 10 year old at the time, I decided to break the thing. I took a sledge hammer to it, threw it around the back yard by the cord. It still maintained its shape, I couldn't dent it. Try that today with any new equipment.
These are same reasons they still have the original elevator motors in the Empire State Building. "They simply dont make motors as durable as these anymore. They've been running continuously since 1933."
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
The 486 was a huge advancement over the 386. Take a look at the instruction cycle counts of the two chips, plus it had the first integrated FPU in the x86 series. Unfortunately, because of the 486SX (SX = sucks), programmers were unable to rely on the presence of hardware floating-point.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The instruction cache is what makes a 40Mhz 386 (with a 8Mhz turbo toggle) the king of oldskool gaming. It just doesn't get any better compatibility-wise.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
true. i just swapped the cpu in my server for a slower one. It generates less heat so im hoping i dont need to keep cooling the hard drives. And eventually I can get that fan out of my computer room window...
on another note, 15 years! Its really making me feel old.
I was using an Atari ST but I lost interest in GEM and eventually MINIX ST took it over. My next computer computer was a 68010 running Systev V R.3 (with BSD demand-paging grafted on) which was my first UNIX system, the MINIX ST conversion came after that. I bought my first 368 as a used Tandy computer and promptly put MINIX on that too (it actually came with MicroSoft XENIX on it but I wanted a source code UNIX.) A little after that I started hearing about this new Linux thing and I had vague plans that I would move the 368 to that but then the power supply blew and that delayed me. During the delay I started to use NetBSD on computers at work and so when I bought my first 486 (a 66 MHz screamer with 32-bit VL bus buslogic SCSI and ET-4000-w32p VL bus video, heh) I loaded it with NetBSD 0.8 not Linux. I stopped using a 486 per-se when I upgraded it to a 83 MHz Pentium (a "clock-halfed" 166 MHz CPU.) The box was given to a friend to work in her office. She put Windoze on it but hey it wasn't my problem.
The 486 my family had was the king of 486 when we got it. DX2-66, 256 KB L2 (upgradable), 16 MB of RAM, 400 MB HD, 2 MB Diamond Viper video card, Sound Blaster 16, and the Anykey keyboard that scared the hell out of me when I managed to remap all the keys wrong and couldn't remember how to fix it. Ahh, youth.
In no particular order:
- 2400 baud modems / Hayes SmartModems
- Downloading shareware from dailup Bulletin Boards
- BBS's with Internet e-mail, fetching files via e-mail FTP commands
- Manually configuring IRQ's on ISA cards
- Mastering config.sys and autoexec.bat
- 14-inch monitor with 640x480 display
- AT command strings / {COMMO} software
- TSRs "Terminate and Stay Resident" programs
- Xmodem, Ymodem and Zmodem protocols
- UMB, EMM, XMS and all that DOS memory mgmt
- UUENCODE
- GOPHER
- 486SX/25 was easily overclocked to 33 mHz!
- BBS Doors, like VGA Planets
- ANSI graphics
- Everything had its own ISA card!
- Friends and relatives were actually impressed that you built and configured your very own computer!
I still have one, a 16 MB machine, in my basement. It runs Linux (Redhat 5.2) and for years now has been my packet radio machine. It sits there all day and you know what? 16 million clock cycles per second is plenty to send a few bytes per second through the (iamginary) ether utterly reliably and with plenty of power to spare.
And:
- No cooling fan to break
- Very low power
The 486 was a fantastic chip, and is still great today.
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
Don't forget the worst piece of Shit EVER to come out of Intel...
The 486SL and it's companion chip (don't remember the number). Our HW guys designed some custom hardware around it, and it was buggy as hell.
The ICE (necessary for BIOS development) sucked giant donkey dongs, and in general it was crap.
We couldn't find ANYONE at Intel who would admit to having worked on this turkey.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Unicomp is manufacturing buckling spring keyboards that are almost like the IBM Model-M keyboards you describe--steel backplate and all. I own one. It weighs about seven pounds and has exactly the feel and sound I remeber from so many years ago.
They sell them on-line starting at about sixty US dollars. You can get them 104-style, 101 style (without Windows keys), or in black.
Hell, they even make a Linux-style keyboard, with ctrl, caps lock, and escape re-arranged!
Are you forgetting that these were the days when a keyboard cost $150 when you spilled Tab into in, and a modem cost $300 when your cat chewed through the power cable? (I miss poor fluffy.)
You were paying for quality, and you can do the same today. My $50 Chaintech nForce 2 motherboard was OK, but I get a lot more stability and features (and hopefully, life expectancy) out of my $150 Asus.
It's not just the young kids who think this. Some waste recycling companies share this opinion too
Say no to software patents.
I remember when these came out, friends and I joked about how much heat these put off and how they needed heat sinks. The funny part was we were all like, "whats next, having fans attached directly to the CPU, hahahahaaha". ;)
My dad has a KLH 286 he uses to run his business. I bought him a 2Ghz Celeron eMachine and he won't give up his 286. I cringe everytime I see him boot that thing into DOS and churn out bid proposals on his Tandy 9-pin printer.
It just goes to show you, you don't have to have the fastest or fanciest machine to get the job done. Sometimes, however, it is good to realize that the screaching eyesore in your office is ready for the grave. (I mean really, have you ever trying to have a conversation next to a wide-carriage dot-matrix printer.)
Hubble got an upgrade a few years ago from a 60's mainframe chip to a 486. I'm not sure how that affects its capabilities, but the stunning photographs that first made it famous predate the upgrade.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Does anyone know why it was called the 8086, 80386, etc?
Get paid to search..It's geniune and
Wouldn't even depleted uranium still radiate somewhat ? And wouldn't that radiation cause electric discharges and random data corruption in the computer (not to mention in the users cells) ?
I remember reading safety instructions for diskettes once. The last instruction went something like "The electromagnetic pulse caused by a nuclear explosion might cause data corruption". I have to admit, those were thorough instructions :).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
486 sx came with the buit in floating point unit disable for marketing and price control reasons...
But it came anyway... (well on the early releases)
Just curious.....is there a port of the linux kernel to the i860 architecture?
Or does NetBSD or something like it support it?
My 10 year old laser printer is sitting right here, chugging along fine on an i860. I remember when I got it that it was the fastest processor I owned. And had more memory than my desktop.
I remember working at a Pace Membership Warehouse (eventually bought out by Walmart/Sam's Club) as a forklift driver and having to constantly go over to the Electronics Dept. to help with computer sales customer service because it was said "You know about computers and stuff, answer their questions".
....SL, SX, DX, DX2, DX4 , we had computers based on each cpu displayed, and I would inevitably be led into "tech debates" with uninformed customers.
I tried several times to explain the processor differences to people buying computers; 486
I once had a guy argue with me that a DX2 meant that there were two processors. I tried, courteously, to explan that was not the case, and eventually decided to walk away and let the sales worker handle the man.
The sales guy assured the customer that he was correct, that the DX2 did designate a dual processor mobo.
Ironic twist: The man returned with the computer a couple of months later and claimed the sales guy lied to him, that the computer in fact, did only have ONE cpu. I didn't gloat, but I thought what a moron. I mentioned to the returns staff the context of the sale and the customer's request to return the computer was rejected.