486 Turns 15 Years Old

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Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday June 12, 2004 @01:17AM from the looking-back dept.

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?'"

22 of 495 comments (clear)

jup by Anonymous Coward · 2004-06-12 01:19 · Score: 5, Insightful

15 years old and still routing my packets. :))
1. Re:jup by Anonymous Coward · 2004-06-12 01:21 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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.
2. Re:jup by Anonymous Coward · 2004-06-12 01:36 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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*
3. Re: jup by mrjb · 2004-06-12 02:38 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Shame on all of you. In those 15 years, we've seen what was considered state-of-the-art, expensive server hardware degrade to 'suitable for wordprocessing', to a mere packet router. Despite of all pretty eye candy, software isn't what it used to be. "My computer is too slow" is an excuse often heard instead of "my software is badly designed". Of course in those days we had to carve the 0's and 1's of our code in stone, after walking barefeet uphill both ways through blizards. For those who always have had the luxury of lightning fast machines, maybe for a bit you should stand still at what computers at that time were already capable of without 3D accelerator board and a mere 33 megahertz processor.
  
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4. Re:jup by nycsubway · 2004-06-12 02:44 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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."
  
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5. Re:jup by torako · 2004-06-12 04:46 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  While I definitely agree that your hardware is humble and still lives up to what you need to do with it, one has to consider the a dual PPRO was probably really expensive high-end machine back when it was new....
  
  So unless you bought it used you probably spent a lot of bucks on it back when people would laugh at you and say "Well, what overkill.. What can your PPRO practically do that my old 386 with DOS and Word 5.0 can't?"
6. Re:jup by Dogtanian · 2004-06-12 06:05 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  a modem cost $300 when your cat chewed through the power cable? (I miss poor fluffy.)
  
  Fluffy seems like an unusual name for a modem.
  
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7. Re:jup by Anonymous Coward · 2004-06-12 10:29 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  It doesn't look like you ever actually used one much. Funnily enough (given the parent article), I had the pleasure of using the Happauge 4860 motherboard which took both a 486 and 860. It was great - I could run UNIX on the 486, and then compile and build 860 programs, running programs on both processors simultaneously. It was good for me, because I could use the 860 simply as a coprocessor, but a very powerful one (it left even a 4167, let alone the 486's onchip FPU in its dust..), never having to worry about actually dealing with an i860 OS (of which there were some ,but I never had one...)
  
  For all its quirks, I wouldn't agree that the 80860 was a sucky processor. It was fast, but weird. Faster than anything else out there, mind. There were no Alphas back then. It left the 486 in its dust, at least until the very latest 486s (100MHz DX4s, etc)
  
  It was also the first non-RAM million-transistor chip from anyone, ever. :) And on that note, in typical Slashdot style, the article has a simple factual error: the 486 and 860 were _not_ released simultaneously; the 860 came first.
w00t by Anonymous Coward · 2004-06-12 01:19 · Score: 5, Funny

Three more years until she's legal!
1. Re:w00t by t_allardyce · 2004-06-12 01:59 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  prostration!? that sounds like a cross between prostate and castration.. erm.. *backs off slowly*
  
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And take that thought... by philntc · 2004-06-12 01:22 · Score: 5, Insightful

about how feeble a device that a 486 is today, and look at the PC in front of you now.

What will be sitting in its place 15 years from now? A.I. or bloatware?
Obvlivious by z0ink · 2004-06-12 01:22 · Score: 5, Funny

Imagine a beowolf clu....
Oh. 15 years old, right.

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Whoa... by su2ge · 2004-06-12 01:22 · Score: 5, Funny

Ahhh, those were the days..... Gorilla still ran at a decent speed, but then when these new fangled contraptions came around, the banana moved at the speed of light!
It was my first by L.+VeGas · 2004-06-12 01:32 · Score: 5, Funny

I remember watching my brother show me his 386 with sound. Dr. Sbiatso and all that. It so blew me away that I saved every dime and got a 486 with a video capture card, sound card, modem, blah blah blah. Cost me $3,500 For two years, every almost waking spare moment I had was spent on that machine.

That experience made me what I am today. A Slashdot geek with an old 486.

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Re:i860 by moreati · 2004-06-12 01:33 · Score: 5, Insightful

I'd never heard of it either, but google and wikipedia to the rescue:

Intel i860

Basically it was a highend RISC architecture, dependant on smarts in the compiler to achieve good performance, it flopped. Quote:

Paper performance was impressive for a single-chip solution; however, real-world performance was anything but. One problem, perhaps unrecognized at the time, was that runtime code paths are difficult to predict, meaning that it becomes exceedingly difficult to properly order instructions at compile time
.

The parallels with the Itanium are striking.

Designing a compiler which allows the Itanium to perform up to its potential has proved to be a difficult task and a very serious issue. Improvements are steadily being made; still, porting software to Itanium has a reputation for difficulty.
Engineering Samples Only by Waffle+Iron · 2004-06-12 01:33 · Score: 5, Informative

486 engineering samples were available in June 1989, but they were buggy as hell. There were several severe problems with features such as the page table logic in early steppings.
Later in the year, IBM introduced an upgrade kludge 486 piggy-back board that could be shoehorned into their 386-based PS/2 Model 80s. However, IIRC, these all had to be recalled due to the bugs in the early 486s.
End users didn't get to see a significant number of correctly functioning 486 systems until early in 1990.
BTW, if you ever saw the processor specs for the i860, its byzantine complexity made the x86 architecture look clean and elegant. There's no wonder it never took off.
Release two chips at once... by Yhippa · 2004-06-12 01:36 · Score: 5, Funny

Pretty RISCy maneuver, eh?
Re:Good times by cr@ckwhore · 2004-06-12 01:45 · Score: 5, Funny

OH... and it had one of those mHz displays on the front, and with one press of the magical turbo button, I could go from 25 to 33 flat!

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Wake-up Call by Digitus1337 · 2004-06-12 02:21 · Score: 5, Funny

Hmm... maybe it's finally time to upgrade.
HOWTO: Diffusing a leaner by niew · 2004-06-12 02:58 · Score: 5, Informative

We used mirrors to check for leaners so they never got us.

You may already know this, but for the benefit of some of our other readers...
When trapped in your room by a live leaner, crack the door open a little bit, then snap it closed. If you do it right, the leaner will be diffused.
Then make sure you find who did it and penny them into their rooms. That's a lot harder to open from the inside ;)
Beowulf was 486 by r00t · 2004-06-12 03:14 · Score: 5, Informative

The original Beowulf cluster was 486-based.
It had 16 machines.
Re:That website they linked to... by ranmachan · 2004-06-12 03:14 · Score: 5, Informative

> "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 one is actually true.

Officially, once turned on, you could not leave the protected mode on the 286. IIRC there is an undocumented 'loadall' instruction which allows you to do this though. But I doubt Windows was using that one. Instead the BIOS provides functionally to exit protected mode by doing a silent warm reboot (It puts some magic value into the CMOS RAM, causes the processor to reboot and the bootup code checks for the magic value and returns to the OS).

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