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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.
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*
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.
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?
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.
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 ----
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
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!
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". ;)
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
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.