
"Seriously - those first 386 chips barely worked at all. " Anyone remember? - yuhong
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.folklore.computers/msg/d11e88d27137261b?hl=en
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thought_alarm
Interesting post, but consider its header...

    
    
        From: "Tony Ingenoso" <aingenosoNOS...@prodigy.net>
        Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
        Subject: Re: IBM MIcrochannel??
        X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4807.1700
        Date: Tue, 07 May 2002 14:43:13 GMT
    

I sadly wonder if anyone will be linking to any Hacker News comments 10 or 20
or even 30 years from now.

For all its strengths and flaws, there is a historical archival quality about
Usenet that is quite compelling.

~~~
rbranson
Perhaps millions of great ideas and billions of pieces of knowledge have been
lost to the almost entirely ethereal IRC as well. The somewhat permanent
nature of Usenet and, to a lesser degree, mailing lists, subliminally changes
the nature of the conversation.

I feel like we lose some of the ultimate benefits of "real" protocols by using
the web as a means for two-way communications, but we also gain a platform for
experimentation and rapid prototyping that leads to things like Hacker News.

------
pnp
Raymond Chen recently posted about 386 B1 problems. In the end Microsoft
decided not to support it. I imagine most early 386 chips just ran 16-bit MS-
DOS code.

Raymond's article:

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/01/12/10114...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/01/12/10114521.aspx)

~~~
yuhong
Yes, this inspired this in the first place.

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Osiris
This reminds me of the good ol' days of the "Turbo" button on computers.
Seriously, why would anyone purposefully half the clock speed of their
processor?

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Many old programs were written without proper timers -- for example, in many
old games if the processor ran twice as fast, everything happened twice as
fast.

Also, completely unrelated, but the processor in the computer you are using
right now is very probably presently running at less than half of it's maximum
speed.

~~~
malux85
This is the correct reason for the turbo buttons. Most of the program delays
(especially in games) was done inside really basic things like

// Delay for(int i = 0; i <= 10000; i++) { // Do nothing }

This was a bad way of putting delays in the game / program.

I remember when I was young, getting about 10 386 computers and mounting them
on the wall of my bedroom (being young and obcessed with star trek, I wanted
to turn my room into a borg cube) .. I wrote programs that used the parallel
port to flash big arrays LED's on and off. Being young, I didn't know how to
do timing properly on these machines so I used FOR loops like the one above
for delays ... the Turbo button allowed me to half the speed of the faster
machines while running the same code on all of them.

p.s. The unfortunate side effect of putting 'tight' loops of code in your
program as delays meant that the processors got very hot very quickly (this
was back when processors didn't necessarily have fans on them). I ended up
being ordered to de-construct my borg bedroom when the wallpaper set fire
after a chip got hot!

~~~
mahmud
_I remember when I was young, getting about 10 386 computers_

Huh? you had 10 computers? why? how?

~~~
malux85
Friend of a Friend ... his dad worked in a high tech lab and their machines
got upgraded ... I literally rescued them before they went into the skip (they
were rich, selling them was more trouble than it was worth)

I had great fun with those machines ... including daisy chaining them all up
COM1 -> COM2 -> COM1 -> COM2 and writing a chess program in C to have the
machines play games against each other ... took me YEARS to do, but great fun
and learnt heaps.

------
zdw
I wouldn't be surprised. Chip problems are very common - some examples:

    
    
       - The pentium f00f division bug
       - AMD Phenom TLB bug
       - The intel 6xx chipset SATA degrade bug
       - Radioactive cache chips in the Ultrasparc 2 (see here: http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/at_the_mercy_of_suppliers )
       - Bug in the Ultrasparc 1 that allows malicious user processes to stall the processor in 64-bit mode.
    

This isn't a new issue, and will continue. Processor's are very common, and
errata is quite common - here's 52 pages of it for the Core i7:
[http://download.intel.com/design/processor/specupdt/320836.p...](http://download.intel.com/design/processor/specupdt/320836.pdf)

~~~
rphlx
There are errata, and then there are errata. No doubt there are some really
nasty workarounds in the BIOS, but over the past 10 years Intel has been very
good at preventing customer-visible defects at the OS kernel level and above.

------
ComputerGuru
The entire thread makes for a very, very interesting read for anyone
interested in this kind of stuff. Thanks for posting this!

Link to full thread:
[http://groups.google.com/group/alt.folklore.computers/browse...](http://groups.google.com/group/alt.folklore.computers/browse_thread/thread/91d782decdeeca6e/be1da3c55ca113a5?hl=en&);

------
yuhong
Anyone remember the early 386 computers that had the early chips, like the
Compaq DeskPro 386?

~~~
davidst
Little bits of history:

Compaq shipped a computer with a 386 before IBM did. That was quite a coup at
the time and helped establish Compaq as a top-tier computer maker instead of
just another PC-clone vendor.

Compaq was also, in a way, partially responsible for Intel taking marketing
and branding more seriously. When computer buyers were polled with the
question, "Who invented the 386?" the most common answer was "Compaq." Intel
responded, in 1991, with their "Intel Inside" campaign to get their logo and
brand on the outside of the computers where it could be seen.

Cyrix, an Intel competitor at the time, boldly parodied the "Intel Inside"
campaign with their own "Cyrix Instead" campaign.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Cyrix, an Intel competitor at the time, boldly parodied the "Intel Inside"
campaign with their own "Cyrix Instead" campaign.

That sounds like an awful campaign - every bit of copy with "Cyrix instead"
bringing to mind their competitor and subtly suggesting that Cyrix are the
lesser company .. bleurgh.

------
hsmyers
I remember all the way back to the 8080, the 8085 and the Z80--- all quite
fondly in fact. Wrote a great deal of assembler code even with the problem of
Z80 differences </nostalgia>

------
ctdonath
In fairness, the 386 was the first large-volume processor with real memory
management, threading, virtual machine, etc support, to wit the first real
processor as we know it now. The 286 was stunted, requiring a covert reboot to
switch processes. 486 and beyond were incremental improvements in speed and
convenience, not fundamental capability.

~~~
tptacek
The 386 was not the first processor with a modern MMU; you have to go back to
the '70s for that. The 80286 could thread. The 386 didn't have virtual machine
support (you may again be referring to the MMU). And the first generation Core
processor is a drastically different machine in almost every respect from the
386.

~~~
glhaynes
_The 386 didn't have virtual machine support (you may again be referring to
the MMU)._

ctdonath might be referring to Virtual 8086 mode that let multiple real mode
programs run in isolated virtual machines.

------
sliverstorm
This might explain why I've _never_ personally seen a 386, only plenty of
486's

~~~
jrockway
The first computer that I was around to buy was a 386. There were plenty of
them out in the wild; you just happened to buy a 486 first :)

~~~
geedee77
Wow I feel old now - the first one I was around to buy in that family was the
8088! I remember getting excited when we got our first 286

~~~
michaelcampbell
Same here; my first purchase was pre-286. I remember when PC-AT's were the new
hotness.

~~~
egor83
Well, the first computer I owned was Spectrum clone... but this was in Russia
in mid-nineties, so I might look older than my age.

