486 Turns 15 Years Old 495
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?'"
jup (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:jup (Score:5, Interesting)
Including some AVS stuff and an i860 workstation. Man, was it ever a sucky processor.
Re:jup (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:jup (Score:2)
Re:jup (Score:5, Funny)
Re:jup (Score:5, Interesting)
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*
Re:jup (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
on another note, 15 years! Its really making me feel old.
Re:jup (Score:5, Informative)
If you long this, Matias has build a mechanical keyboard called the Tactile Pro (google it buster). It's simply an awesome keyboard like they used to be. It's based on the same mechanical keys that Apple used to have on it's Apple Extended Keyboard (aka, Mac SE and Mac II era). They had to secure one million key switches from the manufacturer in order to keep them in production.
I'll be in the states in ten days. I'm bringing one of those babies back!
Re:jup (Score:3, Informative)
Re:jup (Score:5, Insightful)
The control rooms of the Panama Canal amaze me. After 90 years, they still have the same 3D user interface that the architects originally designed.
Re:jup (Score:5, Interesting)
They sell them on-line [yahoo.com] starting at about sixty US dollars. You can get them 104-style [yahoo.com], 101 style (without Windows keys) [yahoo.com], or in black [yahoo.com].
Hell, they even make a Linux-style keyboard [yahoo.com], with ctrl, caps lock, and escape re-arranged!
Re:jup (Score:3, Interesting)
You were paying for quality, and you can do the same today. My $50 Chaintech nForce 2 motherboard was OK, but I get a lot more stability and features (and hopefully, life expectancy) out of my $150 Asus.
Re:jup (Score:5, Funny)
Fluffy seems like an unusual name for a modem.
Re:jup (Score:3, Interesting)
Wouldn't even depleted uranium still radiate somewhat ? And wouldn't that radiation cause electric discharges and random data corruption in the computer (not to mention in the users cells) ?
I remember reading safety instructions for diskettes once. The last instruction went something like "The electromagnetic pulse caused by a nuclear explosion might cause data corruption". I have to admit, those were thorough instructions :).
Re:jup (Score:4, Funny)
Bah! 486? LOOGSHERIE! When I was your age, we didn't have none of those fangled 486es, oh no sir. 286 was more than enough for everyone... Or was that 64k of RAM? Now let me see...
Re:jup (Score:4, Funny)
Re:jup (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not just the young kids who think this. Some waste recycling companies [valorlux.lu] share this opinion too [slashdot.org]
Re:jup (Score:5, Informative)
I also run NIS, NFS, DHCP, Squid Proxy. I also run mailing lists, tape backup, and a cd burner.
I also run ftp, pop3 and smtp for a lan. Several times a day, the box fetches mail from several hotmail accounts, and alternate POP3. It also fetches and filters data from NNTP. It is also the NTP server for the LAN...
The box? a dual processor PPRO. 200Mhz with 128MB of RAM.
Works fine.
Client side? A 128MB PII 400. Works fine. Maybe one day I'll upgrade, but no reason to now.
Ratboy.
Re:jup (Score:5, Insightful)
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?"
Re:jup (Score:3, Insightful)
The only thing that I will say is that if you add more ram to that 400M
Re:jup (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:jup (Score:4, Funny)
Re:jup (Score:3, Insightful)
Quoth the poster:
I suffer with running Mozilla on a 700 MHz Celeron at work and it's way too slow.
I'll probably get modded into oblivion for having the temerity to say anything negative about a piece of open source software, but Mozilla is bloatware. Mozilla's bloat is the stuff of legends. It out-Gateses Gates.
Re: jup (Score:5, Insightful)
w00t (Score:5, Funny)
Re:w00t (Score:2, Funny)
Legal in Canada (Score:5, Funny)
But in all seriousness, my college room-mate had a 386 and then replaced it with a 486. A guy on our floor had a 486 with tape drives and the works. That was great until someone hit his room with a leaner and hosed his whole backup system (which was on the floor). For all you who don't know what a leaner is, it's when someone fills a garbage can with water and tilts it against someone's door. When they open it, the water splooshes over everything, especially them. Pretty nasty! We used mirrors to check for leaners so they never got us.
Bah, I went from a 286, to a P-133 and then up from there, regularly. Nostalgia time. {{ahhhh}}
HOWTO: Diffusing a leaner (Score:5, Informative)
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 ;)
Re:HOWTO: Diffusing a leaner (Score:5, Funny)
Back in the day, we had a dorm phone system where the circuit was not released until the caller hung up, so to complete the task, you'd call the dorm phone and leave your receiver off the hook so the person had to hang out their window and shout for help.
When I was an MIT student, this happened occasionally, but somebody always took pity on the victim and let them out almost immediately. Usually the perpetrator. All, in all, this is a nasty, potentially dangerous trick to play on somebody. The first rule of hacker ethics is do no harm. The second rule is safety.
I agree (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Legal in Canada (Score:4, Informative)
Re:w00t (Score:4, Funny)
Anyone heading towards mexico?
Perhaps she was overclocked... hey it aint my fault... they just should do that! She said she was a fucking DX... I said.. fine... Lets fuck baby.
She said hang on... i gotta get into protected mode...
I Said.. hey baby.. everything is fucking manged baby... i'm running Desqview and i'll be working the front door and the back door... whats your NUP bitch?
She said "elitewarez"
And so i slipped my login her oblivion2. The bitch was running 3 ports she dropped 3 lines... and i said i'm using them all cauze i have a 0-day load to drop...
She said fuck, better be good... I said fuck yeah.. its the Fairlight release of Jordan in Flight.
She said, i love jordan, hes so smooth... and so i fucked her brain dead and her memmanger screamed for more buffers.
Then she said hold the fuck up... lets get her... I said her?
She said yeah.. my config.sys
I was there.... and her sys was all mine. Her sys was running renegade, but i knew it was just a hacked teleguard...
So i busted through her backdoor and the only words i heard was "QEMM" Then suddenly she demanded that Norton Commander. I said fuck yeah... this shits going to pkunzip on her double -d's.
Dam I was digging it... WHAT? 386... her sys was a 386... SON OF A BITCH... 25sx? What a fucking pig.
No wonder.
Never again will i boot another 486... but now and then i remember the days... so new, so fresh.. ah you never forget your first 286... and if you never forget your 286... try fucking a 486.
Those were the days. Them was my chicks.
Re:w00t (Score:5, Funny)
Aww wow... (Score:2, Funny)
*sniff... memoorrriieesss....
Good times (Score:4, Interesting)
Soundcard, 256K videocard.
I was the king of the block.
Those where good times
Re:Good times (Score:2)
Re:Good times (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Good times (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
486 dx2 66 (Score:3, Funny)
Re:486 dx2 66 (Score:4, Informative)
Slashdotted (Score:4, Informative)
Intel's venerable 486 CPU is now 15-years-old. Intel began working on the 486 in the early 1980s, and introduced the chip in April of 1989. The 486 was essentially an improved, modified version of the 386. The 32-bit 486 was initially manufactured on a one micron process, and was introduced at speeds of 25 and 33MHz.
All 486 chips except for the "sx" versions came with a built-in floating-point unit and contained 8 KB of cache memory. The 486 was capable of 20 MIPS performance, and contained certain features (such as pipelining) which had previously been found in mainframes. As a result of these enhancements the 486 was theoretically able to execute one instruction per clock cycle. Today's processors have clockspeeds 100 times faster than the original 486, but the instructions per clock (IPC) of the latest CPUs isn't much better than the IPC of the 486. Intel also decided to release the 32-bit, superscalar i860 CPU, which was specifically designed for scientific applications, in 1989. In Only the Paranoid survive, Intel's former CEO Andy Grove recounts the dilemma of launching two largely incompatible CPUs at the same time:
We now had two very powerful chips that we were introducing at just about the same time: the 486, largely based on CISC technology and compatible with all the PC software, and the i860, based on RISC technology, which was very fast but compatible with nothing. We didn't know what to do. So we introduced both, figuring we'd let the marketplace decide. However, things were not that simple. Supporting a microprocessor architecture with all the necessary computer-related products - software, sales, and technical support - takes enormous resources. Even a company like Intel had to strain to do an adequate job with just one architecture. And now we had two different and competing efforts, each demanding more and more internal resources. Development projects have a tendency to want to grow like the proverbial mustard seed. The fight for resources and for marketing attention (for example, when meeting with the customer, which processor should we highlight) led to internal debates that were fierce enough to tear apart our microprocessor organization. Meanwhile, our equivocation caused our customers to wonder what Intel really stood for, the 486 or i860?
Compaq recommended to Intel that it abandon the i860 and concentrate all of its efforts on the 486. Microsoft pressured Intel to promote the i860, and strongly encouraged Intel to introduce an i860-based PC. Intel decided to emphasize the 486, and ended up selling hundreds of millions of 486 processors. 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.
And take that thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
What will be sitting in its place 15 years from now? A.I. or bloatware?
Re:And take that thought... (Score:2)
I love the 486. (Score:2, Insightful)
I have a 486 DX/33 box running Slackware Linux. It serves as my router, my firewall, my file server, my print server, my game server, and my media server. This is, without a doubt, the most useful box in all of boxendom.
Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Box Builder
Obvlivious (Score:5, Funny)
Oh. 15 years old, right.
Beowulf was 486 (Score:5, Informative)
It had 16 machines.
Whoa... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Whoa... (Score:3, Informative)
What about Donkey on the original IBM PC, which was distributed as source? That was written by Gates, in part and was MS software.
Or there's this [microsoft.com].
Strangely enough... (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah the memories (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ah the memories (Score:2)
Re:Ah the memories (Score:3, Informative)
My 486 was a 486SX/25 with 4MB RAM 170MB Conner HDD, later upgraded to 8MB with a 2x CD-ROM drive for the small fortune of just over $1,000 (AU).
Back then, incremental versions of Microsoft products provided actual functionality. Memmaker (bundled with MS-DOS 6.0+) was a godsend for anyone who had sat down trying "loadhigh" (autoexec.bat) "devicehigh" (config.sys) and the ordering of drivers to get more than 600KB of conventional memory free.
Games back then had more depth and b
486? (Score:2, Funny)
It's funny, but I can't seem to throw mine away...
It was my first (Score:5, Funny)
That experience made me what I am today. A Slashdot geek with an old 486.
Engineering Samples Only (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Engineering Samples Only (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Engineering Samples Only (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Engineering Samples Only (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Engineering Samples Only (Score:3, Interesting)
The 486SL and it's companion chip (don't remember the number). Our HW guys designed some custom hardware around it, and it was buggy as hell.
The ICE (necessary for BIOS development) sucked giant donkey dongs, and in general it was crap.
We couldn't find ANYONE at Intel who would admit to having worked on this turkey.
Release two chips at once... (Score:5, Funny)
Dodgy computer guy... (Score:3, Funny)
Those things were built like tanks (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
It still lives! (Score:2, Insightful)
Its a tough little sucker though, for the heck of it one day, I installed Starcraft and Bryce 3D 4.0 on it.
Both ran.
Imagining other possibilities (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Ah, the "Cray on a chip" (Score:4, Informative)
Hey! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
pentium (Score:4, Funny)
And who'd forget the classic that went something like...
The Pentium was not officially named 586 because 486+100 turned out to be 585.9999999999999.
Re:pentium (Score:5, Funny)
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do,
Getting hazy, can't divide three by two.
My answers, I can not see 'em,
They're stuck in my Pentium.
It would be fleet, my answers sweet, on a workable FPU.
80386 was more significant. (Score:5, Insightful)
The 80386 is definitely important because 1) it introduced the 32-bit flat memory model, something that subsequent Intel CPU's incorporated, and 2) it could virtualize 8086 sessions, which made it possible to run multiple programs safely (remember what a breakthrough QEMM-386 plus DESQview was?).
The improvements that the 80486 brought was essentially a built-in FPU unit and faster clock speeds.
Re:80386 was more significant. (Score:3, Interesting)
The instruction cache is what makes a 40Mhz 386 (with a 8Mhz turbo toggle) the king of oldskool gaming. It jus
Re:80386 was more significant. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:80386 was more significant. (Score:3, Informative)
4004 - first uP
8008 - Intel's first 8-bit uP
8080 - Other 8-bit uP
8085 - CMOS 8080
8086 - Intel's first 16-bit uP
8087 - Math coprocessor for 8086/8
8088 - 8086 with 8-bit bus, meant it could be used with 8080/8085 chipset
80186/8 - Adds many features to 86/88
80187 - 8087 with new package for 186/8
80286 - Adds protected mode
80287 - Math coP for 286
80385 - Cache controller
80386DX - 32-bit uP
80386SX - DX with 16-bit bus, can be considered 80388
80387 - Math coP for 386 (DX and SX ve
486 still capable (Score:3, Insightful)
Wake-up Call (Score:5, Funny)
386 was more significant (Score:5, Interesting)
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....
Architecture vs. Implementation (Score:3, Interesting)
16MB of ram!! (Score:3, Interesting)
That website they linked to... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:That website they linked to... (Score:5, Informative)
> 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).
Re:That website they linked to... (Score:4, Interesting)
Intel designed the 286 to run UNIX, or a UNIX-like OS. PDP-11 era UNIX, with an address space with 64K protected segments. Each process was to be limited to a few 64K segments. Back then, everybody thought that the hardware had outgrown DOS, and it was time for a real OS.
AT&T built and shipped the "AT&T PC", which actually worked that way. It didn't sell, but it did work. It was just like running UNIX on a PDP-11.
Intel never intended the machine to be used as a psuedo-flat address space with base/displacement addresses. Let alone use the hacks that led to "extended" and "expanded" memory.
With the 386, Intel got the architecture right, and that's essentially what we have today. But the 286, even though it was the mainstream machine during the years PCs really took off, was fundamentally broken.
Hardware Progression Causing Lazy Programming? (Score:4, Insightful)
In the pre-PC days (and to a certain extent games consoles today), the hardware platform remained static for the life of the product. Compare the software released at the beginning of it's life compared to the end - it's streets ahead, particularly games. Coders had no choice but to continually optimise their code, learn new tricks etc. With the advance in PC hardware there isn't the same motivation. You know that when you start a project that by the time it's released the 'average' platform will be more powerful. Won't run on smoothly on a 2.6GHZ P4 with 32MB graphics card? No problem, we'll put that as the minimum spec and recommend something higher.
33MHz is still useful (Score:4, Insightful)
I've still got one too (Score:4, Insightful)
So, I really don't have anything to add, just to point out that you don't even have to convert old 486s into routers or something - they can do basic computer tasks just fine on their own. I can't play Quake on mine, but I can do everything else.
486 in my basement (Score:3, Interesting)
And:
- No cooling fan to break
- Very low power
The 486 was a fantastic chip, and is still great today.
Heat.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Powering Hubble (Score:4, Interesting)
Just wait 'til next year. . . (Score:3, Funny)
me: (in passenger seat) "Okay, turn left up here."
486: (behind the wheel) Cursor turns to hourglass for 10+ seconds.
me: Aaaah! Brake! Brake!
486: Hard drive gets really loud, keeps going straight. Hits mailbox and plows through farmer's market. "Beginning dump of physical memory."
me: (bleeding, picking glass out of skin) "Your brother Pentium wouldn't have crashed like this."
486: (tear) "You know I can't multitask!"
Can you run LINUX on an i860? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or does NetBSD or something like it support it?
Still using an i860 (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh the memories of explaining SL, SX, DX, DX2, DX4 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:i860 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:i860 (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel i860 [wikipedia.org]
Basically it was a highend RISC architecture, dependant on smarts in the compiler to achieve good performance, it flopped. Quote:
.The parallels with the Itanium [wikipedia.org] are striking.
i860 had MMU (Score:3, Informative)
MMU as the Pentium. Using the MMU for paging was
horribly difficult though, because the i860 did
not handle faults well. The OS got stuck with the
job of emulating many partially completed instructions.
Intel used the i860 in the Paragon supercomputer,
which ran a SysV UNIX OS.
Mercury Computer Systems used the i860 on VME
boards with a circuit-switched crossbar interconnect that did 160 megabytes/second
(40 MHz, 4 bytes wide) half-duplex to each node.
That's 1.28 Gb/
Re:i860 (Score:5, Informative)
Intel released the I960 as an embedded chip, expecting to see some military applications. The first versions were the i960KA (without floating point) and i960KB (with floating point). They didn't get all that far in the marketplace. However the i960CA and its followon the i960CF were pretty slick. The i960 had 32 general purpose registers, and a processor-defined function call sequence that always placed a set of 16 on the stack ("caller-owned") and left a set of 16 alone ("args , temp & return values"). The i960CA cached the top 4, 6 or 8 stack frames in on-chip static memory with a 128-bit pathway to the main register set. This gave it amazing function calling and interrupt service performance. We wrote a sample clock-interrupt test that serviced a 100 kHz clock interrupt using only 23% of the CPU. (Remember, this was in 1992...) The product we built (see next paragraph) is still out in the network, switching phone calls.
I remember receiving one of first the 486DX2/66 processors in the city where I live (Columbus Ohio). I was at AT&T/BL at the time, and we were building a product based on a pair of 66MHz 486 and a pair 33 MHz i960CA processors. (Intel sent us a pair of chips for evaluation) We wanted to benchmark them, and I was the only developer whose home system could use the 32-bit capabilities of the 486. The 486DX2/66 was a screamer...
<offtopic>
Being a total geekazoid, I had UNIX (yup, I blew $800 on a "used" SVR3.2 license)! I kept that license current through Novell UNIXware SVR4.2 in 1996, when this new geek-friendly OS called "Linux" had just received BKL-based SMP capability. I tried it, liked it, and kept using it. This "Linux" already had better VM performance (in my opinion) than the traditional UNIX, and semed to me to be on the way to much larger things. I stopped updating my UNIX license, donating it instead to a local high school.
I've been a developer for >30 years and have a clear idea of what I want in a workstation. Linux (and to be honest, including the valuable GNU utilities) provides that set of capabilities better than any other system I've ever used. I don't know about MacOS X, it might be pretty good. But in my experience, Linux has no peer. FYI, this experience includes every Microsoft operating system, every IBM mainframe operating systsem up to VS/ESA, PDP-11 DOS/Batch, RSTS/E, RT-11, VAX/VMS, Data General RDOS, AOS, AOS/VS on the MV4000 and MV8000, classic UNIX on a 68010, UNIX on IBM/Amdahl mainframes, BSD/OS on PCs, SunOS on sparc/2 and Sparc/10, NetBSD and OpenBSD. I also tried out Next and Apollo Domain. Sun and the BSD's came closest to Linux in quality.
Everything else is an also-ran. Finally, at present my day job involves embedded Linux. I've worked with both uClinux (m68k) and real Linux (MPC860 & 826x), (mostly updating and debugging) drivers for both. I have *never* seen a system as robust. Linux itself, the development process that led to its existence, and the ongoing development process that allows it to be such a powerful system, are all major treasures for those willing to recognize them.
</offtopic>
Re:i860 (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really. It certainly did have some nice graphics stuff built in, but I can clearly remember Intel marketing it as "A Supercomputer On a Chip". Intel also made a series of boxes called the ISPC 860 supercomputer containing arrays of i860's and sold it as, guess what, a supercomputer.
As primarily an assembly language programmer, I'm not that fond of RISC processors, but looking at the i860, it seems quite nice compared to a MIPS or ARM.
Failure? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure if the i860 was the failure that everyone is saying it was. This may be true on the desktop, but it was a fairly popular processor in the embedded world for offloading computation.
Re:Oh yes the 486 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Which linux distro? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Atari ST forever !!!.......... /||\ (Score:3, Interesting)