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?'"

Comments

Good times

[Orgazmus]

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 :)

Re:Good times

[MrRTFM]

Those turbo buttons were a pet hate of mine.

They were only ever really useful on the original XT's before the old games used a timer instead of clock cycles, but due to marketing types liking the word 'TURBO' they kept sticking it on for years afterwards. It never served any point - the old games still wouldnt run on the slow setting.

Now, my old TEC-1B single board computer was different - had a 100k pot to vary the clock speed from 0Hz to 100kHz. Thats a feature I would have liked to have on the PC's.

Re:jup

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Ah the memories

[papasui]

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.

Re:jup

[Anonymous Coward]

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*

Imagining other possibilities

[pedantic bore]

It is intriguing to think of how different the computer industry would be today if Intel had decided to emphasize the i860 instead of the 486.

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...

Hey!

[macemoneta]

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.

Re:Engineering Samples Only

[man_ls]

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.

386 was more significant

[nurb432]

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....

Re:jup

[nycsubway]

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."

Re:jup

[willith]

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!