Obsolete processors, 286 vs. 386

The article here states regarding the 386SX at 16MHz

"The 386 was a huge advance but you'd never know it from one of these 
little slugs — they were usually out-performed by the better 286s."

"Even with 4MB or 8MB RAM, you wouldn't want to run Windows 3.1 on a 
386SX-16 though. The SX-33s and DX-40s that followed soon after were 
vastly faster."

<http://www.redhill.net.au/c/c-2.html>

So my family actually had one of the "slug"-based PCs in the early 
1990s. I don't remember it being nearly as bad as the article makes it 
out to be, particularly with respect to the important things in a 13 
year old's life at that time: video games.

It claims some of the better 286es would perform as well in practice as 
this processor. I had a friend who had the "standard issue" 286: 286-16 
MHz, 1 meg RAM, 256k VGA card, 40 meg hard drive.

When playing the games of the time that relied heavily on "pseudo-3D" 
CPU effects with a lot of sprite scaling, fixed-point math for 
calculating angles the 386 system would run rings around the 286 system 
- whatever graphics code it was that was unusably slow on the 286 was 
nice and smooth on the 386. The article seems to be talking about 
performance of business applications and maybe the comparison was valid 
there, but for "leisure" applications there wasn't any comparison. It 
was even better when the stock 1MB of RAM was upgraded to 2.

Wondering what might have made the difference; the article claims the 
SX-16 didn't have an onboard cache but the 386 arch IIRC supported an 
external cache; not sure how many systems actually implemented this. 
Faster bus clock, maybe?

To my recollection Win 3.1 also ran fine on a 386SX-16 with 2 megs of 
RAM and a 100 meg hdd. A few years later another friend's family picked 
up a 486DX/2-66 which of course would smoke everything else we had 
available.

On 10/13/2017 07:29 AM, bitrex wrote:
> The article here states regarding the 386SX at 16MHz
> 
> "The 386 was a huge advance but you'd never know it from one of these 
> little slugs — they were usually out-performed by the better 286s."
> 
> "Even with 4MB or 8MB RAM, you wouldn't want to run Windows 3.1 on a 
> 386SX-16 though. The SX-33s and DX-40s that followed soon after were 
> vastly faster."
> 
> <http://www.redhill.net.au/c/c-2.html>
> 
> So my family actually had one of the "slug"-based PCs in the early 
> 1990s. I don't remember it being nearly as bad as the article makes it 
> out to be, particularly with respect to the important things in a 13 
> year old's life at that time: video games.
> 
> It claims some of the better 286es would perform as well in practice as 
> this processor. I had a friend who had the "standard issue" 286: 286-16 
> MHz, 1 meg RAM, 256k VGA card, 40 meg hard drive.

It's possible I'm remembering incorrectly and it was actually a 12MHz 286.

On a sunny day (Fri, 13 Oct 2017 07:29:44 -0400) it happened bitrex
<bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote in <Is1EB.2153$pU1.1117@fx17.iad>:

>The article here states regarding the 386SX at 16MHz
>
>"The 386 was a huge advance but you'd never know it from one of these 
>little slugs &mdash; they were usually out-performed by the better 286s."
>
>"Even with 4MB or 8MB RAM, you wouldn't want to run Windows 3.1 on a 
>386SX-16 though. The SX-33s and DX-40s that followed soon after were 
>vastly faster."
>
><http://www.redhill.net.au/c/c-2.html>
>
>So my family actually had one of the "slug"-based PCs in the early 
>1990s. I don't remember it being nearly as bad as the article makes it 
>out to be, particularly with respect to the important things in a 13 
>year old's life at that time: video games.
>
>It claims some of the better 286es would perform as well in practice as 
>this processor. I had a friend who had the "standard issue" 286: 286-16 
>MHz, 1 meg RAM, 256k VGA card, 40 meg hard drive.
>
>When playing the games of the time that relied heavily on "pseudo-3D" 
>CPU effects with a lot of sprite scaling, fixed-point math for 
>calculating angles the 386 system would run rings around the 286 system 
>- whatever graphics code it was that was unusably slow on the 286 was 
>nice and smooth on the 386. The article seems to be talking about 
>performance of business applications and maybe the comparison was valid 
>there, but for "leisure" applications there wasn't any comparison. It 
>was even better when the stock 1MB of RAM was upgraded to 2.
>
>Wondering what might have made the difference; the article claims the 
>SX-16 didn't have an onboard cache but the 386 arch IIRC supported an 
>external cache; not sure how many systems actually implemented this. 
>Faster bus clock, maybe?
>
>To my recollection Win 3.1 also ran fine on a 386SX-16 with 2 megs of 
>RAM and a 100 meg hdd. A few years later another friend's family picked 
>up a 486DX/2-66 which of course would smoke everything else we had 
>available.

My first PC (I bought) was a 486DX2-66 running win3.1 on DRDOS
It replaced my home build Z80 system, but my Z80 was faster as it had a RAM disk that it loaded
the floppies in, so you would always work from RAM disk (was I/O mapped).

For my work I designed among other things ISA cards with stuff for that old 286 and 386.
I never liked the architecture, and still don't.
We worked close with IBM, I remember boss called me in his office one day
and showed the first 386, it WAS blazingly fast..
Games? I dunno, I had a 3D game with planes on that DX2-66, needed special shutter glasses, shutters driven from the parport.
When the evil Widows from RatMond came with win 98 (probably in 1998) that thing they dared sell as an OS
(was actually just to kill Digital Research DOS) no longer would run on DRDOS,
so and then my 3Dgame no longer worked either.
In the same year however I found Linux on some CD.. and that was the end for that Ratmond crap.

Now with raspberries and pads? who needs a PC?
;-)

On 10/13/2017 07:59 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:

> My first PC (I bought) was a 486DX2-66 running win3.1 on DRDOS
> It replaced my home build Z80 system, but my Z80 was faster as it had a RAM disk that it loaded
> the floppies in, so you would always work from RAM disk (was I/O mapped).
> 
> For my work I designed among other things ISA cards with stuff for that old 286 and 386.
> I never liked the architecture, and still don't.
> We worked close with IBM, I remember boss called me in his office one day
> and showed the first 386, it WAS blazingly fast..
> Games? I dunno, I had a 3D game with planes on that DX2-66, needed special shutter glasses, shutters driven from the parport.
> When the evil Widows from RatMond came with win 98 (probably in 1998) that thing they dared sell as an OS
> (was actually just to kill Digital Research DOS) no longer would run on DRDOS,
> so and then my 3Dgame no longer worked either.
> In the same year however I found Linux on some CD.. and that was the end for that Ratmond crap.
> 
> Now with raspberries and pads? who needs a PC?
> ;-)
> 

Unfortunately there's still a lot of stuff that's not built for ARM.

On Fri, 13 Oct 2017 07:29:44 -0400, bitrex
<bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

>The article here states regarding the 386SX at 16MHz
>
>"The 386 was a huge advance but you'd never know it from one of these 
>little slugs &#4294967295; they were usually out-performed by the better 286s."
>
>"Even with 4MB or 8MB RAM, you wouldn't want to run Windows 3.1 on a 
>386SX-16 though. The SX-33s and DX-40s that followed soon after were 
>vastly faster."
>
><http://www.redhill.net.au/c/c-2.html>
>
>So my family actually had one of the "slug"-based PCs in the early 
>1990s. I don't remember it being nearly as bad as the article makes it 
>out to be, particularly with respect to the important things in a 13 
>year old's life at that time: video games.
>
>It claims some of the better 286es would perform as well in practice as 
>this processor. I had a friend who had the "standard issue" 286: 286-16 
>MHz, 1 meg RAM, 256k VGA card, 40 meg hard drive.
>
>When playing the games of the time that relied heavily on "pseudo-3D" 
>CPU effects with a lot of sprite scaling, fixed-point math for 
>calculating angles the 386 system would run rings around the 286 system 
>- whatever graphics code it was that was unusably slow on the 286 was 
>nice and smooth on the 386. The article seems to be talking about 
>performance of business applications and maybe the comparison was valid 
>there, but for "leisure" applications there wasn't any comparison. It 
>was even better when the stock 1MB of RAM was upgraded to 2.
>
>Wondering what might have made the difference; the article claims the 
>SX-16 didn't have an onboard cache but the 386 arch IIRC supported an 
>external cache; not sure how many systems actually implemented this. 
>Faster bus clock, maybe?
>
>To my recollection Win 3.1 also ran fine on a 386SX-16 with 2 megs of 
>RAM and a 100 meg hdd. A few years later another friend's family picked 
>up a 486DX/2-66 which of course would smoke everything else we had 
>available.

The 80286 was just a stop gap between 8086 and iAPX432 when Intel
realized that they could not get decent performance out of the 432.

The segment system of 286 was stupid compared to later x86 models. In
addition, you could switch the 286 from normal mode to protected mode,
but switching back required setting up the reset vector to a DOS
program and performing a processor reset to run a DOS program.

I acquired a 10 MHz 286 when I started my company, mainly for sending
invoices and using it as a terminal emulator with disk storage.

There was a semi-graphical Windows 2.x running on 286, but more or
less useless for any real work. It was much more convenient to use
plain MS-DOS.

In retrospect I was lucky, when I bought the next computer (486) and
invested in a sufficient large memory for running Windows NT 3.51
instead of wafting for Win95 introduction later that year. After
reading horror stories about Win9x unreliability, NT3.51 was as stable
as RSX-11 or VMS that I had been used to in the previous decades.
 

The article is simply bogus:
The first available 386 PC was a 16 MHz model from Compaq and cost a 
small fortune, but it was a huge step forward compared to the 
(overclocked) 286 machines that preceeded it.

Terje

bitrex wrote:
> The article here states regarding the 386SX at 16MHz
>
> "The 386 was a huge advance but you'd never know it from one of these
> little slugs — they were usually out-performed by the better 286s."
>
> "Even with 4MB or 8MB RAM, you wouldn't want to run Windows 3.1 on a
> 386SX-16 though. The SX-33s and DX-40s that followed soon after were
> vastly faster."
>
> <http://www.redhill.net.au/c/c-2.html>
>
> So my family actually had one of the "slug"-based PCs in the early
> 1990s. I don't remember it being nearly as bad as the article makes it
> out to be, particularly with respect to the important things in a 13
> year old's life at that time: video games.
>
> It claims some of the better 286es would perform as well in practice as
> this processor. I had a friend who had the "standard issue" 286: 286-16
> MHz, 1 meg RAM, 256k VGA card, 40 meg hard drive.
>
> When playing the games of the time that relied heavily on "pseudo-3D"
> CPU effects with a lot of sprite scaling, fixed-point math for
> calculating angles the 386 system would run rings around the 286 system
> - whatever graphics code it was that was unusably slow on the 286 was
> nice and smooth on the 386. The article seems to be talking about
> performance of business applications and maybe the comparison was valid
> there, but for "leisure" applications there wasn't any comparison. It
> was even better when the stock 1MB of RAM was upgraded to 2.
>
> Wondering what might have made the difference; the article claims the
> SX-16 didn't have an onboard cache but the 386 arch IIRC supported an
> external cache; not sure how many systems actually implemented this.
> Faster bus clock, maybe?
>
> To my recollection Win 3.1 also ran fine on a 386SX-16 with 2 megs of
> RAM and a 100 meg hdd. A few years later another friend's family picked
> up a 486DX/2-66 which of course would smoke everything else we had
> available.


-- 
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

In article <Is1EB.2153$pU1.1117@fx17.iad>,
 bitrex <bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote:

> The article here states regarding the 386SX at 16MHz
> 
> "The 386 was a huge advance but you'd never know it from one of these 
> little slugs &mdash; they were usually out-performed by the better 286s."
> 
> "Even with 4MB or 8MB RAM, you wouldn't want to run Windows 3.1 on a 
> 386SX-16 though. The SX-33s and DX-40s that followed soon after were 
> vastly faster."
> 
> <http://www.redhill.net.au/c/c-2.html>
> 
> So my family actually had one of the "slug"-based PCs in the early 
> 1990s. I don't remember it being nearly as bad as the article makes it 
> out to be, particularly with respect to the important things in a 13 
> year old's life at that time: video games.
> 
> It claims some of the better 286es would perform as well in practice as 
> this processor. I had a friend who had the "standard issue" 286: 286-16 
> MHz, 1 meg RAM, 256k VGA card, 40 meg hard drive.
> 
> When playing the games of the time that relied heavily on "pseudo-3D" 
> CPU effects with a lot of sprite scaling, fixed-point math for 
> calculating angles the 386 system would run rings around the 286 system 
> - whatever graphics code it was that was unusably slow on the 286 was 
> nice and smooth on the 386. The article seems to be talking about 
> performance of business applications and maybe the comparison was valid 
> there, but for "leisure" applications there wasn't any comparison. It 
> was even better when the stock 1MB of RAM was upgraded to 2.
> 
> Wondering what might have made the difference; the article claims the 
> SX-16 didn't have an onboard cache but the 386 arch IIRC supported an 
> external cache; not sure how many systems actually implemented this. 
> Faster bus clock, maybe?
> 
> To my recollection Win 3.1 also ran fine on a 386SX-16 with 2 megs of 
> RAM and a 100 meg hdd. A few years later another friend's family picked 
> up a 486DX/2-66 which of course would smoke everything else we had 
> available.

My first (Microsoft compatible) PC was a 33Mhz 386 with a 64K direct 
mapped cache. I was one of the first on the block to get one since I 
just started working for the company making the chip sets. It ran rings 
around anything else that was available at the time, but there were 
initial problems with getting the cache working, and until it did it was 
less than impressive. Prior to that job I worked with a Data General 
Eclipse MV/8000, and going to the new job felt like I had stepped 10 
years back in time. It took a while to get used to the idea I couldn't 
just start a new thread running, or have a background task working on 
something. I think we could have been much further along much faster if 
Microsoft never existed.

On a sunny day (Fri, 13 Oct 2017 09:12:11 -0400) it happened bitrex
<bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> wrote in <LY2EB.2154$pU1.1652@fx17.iad>:

>On 10/13/2017 07:59 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
>
>> My first PC (I bought) was a 486DX2-66 running win3.1 on DRDOS
>> It replaced my home build Z80 system, but my Z80 was faster as it had a RAM disk that it loaded
>> the floppies in, so you would always work from RAM disk (was I/O mapped).
>> 
>> For my work I designed among other things ISA cards with stuff for that old 286 and 386.
>> I never liked the architecture, and still don't.
>> We worked close with IBM, I remember boss called me in his office one day
>> and showed the first 386, it WAS blazingly fast..
>> Games? I dunno, I had a 3D game with planes on that DX2-66, needed special shutter glasses, shutters driven from the parport.
>> When the evil Widows from RatMond came with win 98 (probably in 1998) that thing they dared sell as an OS
>> (was actually just to kill Digital Research DOS) no longer would run on DRDOS,
>> so and then my 3Dgame no longer worked either.
>> In the same year however I found Linux on some CD.. and that was the end for that Ratmond crap.
>> 
>> Now with raspberries and pads? who needs a PC?
>> ;-)
>> 
>
>Unfortunately there's still a lot of stuff that's not built for ARM.

It was a bit of making fun, while writing that I was using 3 raspies, 1 PC, 2 laptops.
;-)

But of course you need to compile from source, so all that closed source stuff is out.

On Friday, October 13, 2017 at 5:29:53 AM UTC-6, bitrex wrote:
> The article here states regarding the 386SX at 16MHz
> 
> "The 386 was a huge advance but you'd never know it from one of these 
> little slugs — they were usually out-performed by the better 286s."
> 
> "Even with 4MB or 8MB RAM, you wouldn't want to run Windows 3.1 on a 
> 386SX-16 though. The SX-33s and DX-40s that followed soon after were 
> vastly faster."
> 
> <http://www.redhill.net.au/c/c-2.html>
> 
> So my family actually had one of the "slug"-based PCs in the early 
> 1990s. I don't remember it being nearly as bad as the article makes it 
> out to be, particularly with respect to the important things in a 13 
> year old's life at that time: video games.
> 
> It claims some of the better 286es would perform as well in practice as 
> this processor. I had a friend who had the "standard issue" 286: 286-16 
> MHz, 1 meg RAM, 256k VGA card, 40 meg hard drive.
> 
> When playing the games of the time that relied heavily on "pseudo-3D" 
> CPU effects with a lot of sprite scaling, fixed-point math for 
> calculating angles the 386 system would run rings around the 286 system 
> - whatever graphics code it was that was unusably slow on the 286 was 
> nice and smooth on the 386. The article seems to be talking about 
> performance of business applications and maybe the comparison was valid 
> there, but for "leisure" applications there wasn't any comparison. It 
> was even better when the stock 1MB of RAM was upgraded to 2.
> 
> Wondering what might have made the difference; the article claims the 
> SX-16 didn't have an onboard cache but the 386 arch IIRC supported an 
> external cache; not sure how many systems actually implemented this. 
> Faster bus clock, maybe?
> 
> To my recollection Win 3.1 also ran fine on a 386SX-16 with 2 megs of 
> RAM and a 100 meg hdd. A few years later another friend's family picked 
> up a 486DX/2-66 which of course would smoke everything else we had 
> available.

My first PC was an IBM-XT (8088).  I upgraded to the 286 and enjoyed a noticeable performance increase (along with color graphics).

When the 386 first came out my roommate got one and although it was faster than my 286, it didn't inspire me to drop the cash on one.  When the DX-40 version came out I finally got one, and it was indeed much faster than my rommate's SX-16.

When the 486 came out, I made the plunge first and got the DX-33 (I knew to avoid the SX line).  Later my roommate got the DX2-66 and I was endlessly jealous at how much faster it compiled code and ran games.

Windows didn't become useful to me until the 486 era.

On 10/13/2017 10:58 AM, DemonicTubes wrote:
> On Friday, October 13, 2017 at 5:29:53 AM UTC-6, bitrex wrote:
>> The article here states regarding the 386SX at 16MHz
>>
>> "The 386 was a huge advance but you'd never know it from one of these
>> little slugs — they were usually out-performed by the better 286s."
>>
>> "Even with 4MB or 8MB RAM, you wouldn't want to run Windows 3.1 on a
>> 386SX-16 though. The SX-33s and DX-40s that followed soon after were
>> vastly faster."
>>
>> <http://www.redhill.net.au/c/c-2.html>
>>
>> So my family actually had one of the "slug"-based PCs in the early
>> 1990s. I don't remember it being nearly as bad as the article makes it
>> out to be, particularly with respect to the important things in a 13
>> year old's life at that time: video games.
>>
>> It claims some of the better 286es would perform as well in practice as
>> this processor. I had a friend who had the "standard issue" 286: 286-16
>> MHz, 1 meg RAM, 256k VGA card, 40 meg hard drive.
>>
>> When playing the games of the time that relied heavily on "pseudo-3D"
>> CPU effects with a lot of sprite scaling, fixed-point math for
>> calculating angles the 386 system would run rings around the 286 system
>> - whatever graphics code it was that was unusably slow on the 286 was
>> nice and smooth on the 386. The article seems to be talking about
>> performance of business applications and maybe the comparison was valid
>> there, but for "leisure" applications there wasn't any comparison. It
>> was even better when the stock 1MB of RAM was upgraded to 2.
>>
>> Wondering what might have made the difference; the article claims the
>> SX-16 didn't have an onboard cache but the 386 arch IIRC supported an
>> external cache; not sure how many systems actually implemented this.
>> Faster bus clock, maybe?
>>
>> To my recollection Win 3.1 also ran fine on a 386SX-16 with 2 megs of
>> RAM and a 100 meg hdd. A few years later another friend's family picked
>> up a 486DX/2-66 which of course would smoke everything else we had
>> available.
> 
> My first PC was an IBM-XT (8088).  I upgraded to the 286 and enjoyed a noticeable performance increase (along with color graphics).
> 
> When the 386 first came out my roommate got one and although it was faster than my 286, it didn't inspire me to drop the cash on one.  When the DX-40 version came out I finally got one, and it was indeed much faster than my rommate's SX-16.
> 
> When the 486 came out, I made the plunge first and got the DX-33 (I knew to avoid the SX line).  Later my roommate got the DX2-66 and I was endlessly jealous at how much faster it compiled code and ran game >
> Windows didn't become useful to me until the 486 era.
> 

That old 386SX of ours had a long service life. It was my main machine 
up until I went to college in 1997 and switched to a Pentium 166. It 
stayed home and IIRC Dad used it from time to time as a word 
processing/email machine (with AOL) running Win 3.1 until at least circa 
2001, still cranking along on the 100MB hard drive and 2 megs of RAM.

I think the only service it ever needed was a replacement PSU sometime 
around 1994.