Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

> In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me.

True for many, many of us, I suspect. My family bought a 286 in the early 90s and it cost something like $2000 CAD then, which is nearly $4000 now; but salaries were lower then, this would have been something like 5-6% of my single income family's yearly post-tax earnings for the year, and if you think about it as the % of "disposable" income it was probably more like 60% of it for the year.

Obviously it paid off in that it set me on the path for my career, hard to make any other investment as good as that, but who would have known that at the time? I'm glad that there were so many ads positioning computers as being educational and not just game machines; even though in reality I think it was learning about the computer to make the games work that taught me way more than any educational software ever did.

similar, but I got the 486 DX2-66.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these inflation-adjusted prices due to the big Apple Computer anniversary — an Apple // cost $5000 in 2026 dollars, meanwhile a $600 Macbook Neo cost $150 in 1980 cash!

What helped me reconcile this was an observation that we’ve inverted the prices of necessities and luxury goods. Rent and mortgage in particular were a much smaller slice of income back then, but luxury goods were very expensive, so one would save up for a year or two to buy a new TV or a computer for the kids.

Now the necessities take a much larger slice of our income, but TVs and computers are incredibly cheap. It takes very little money to get a nice computer, and not-buying it barely makes a dent in the bills. This isn’t a good thing.

I do disagree a little with your observation regarding the industry “squeezing every ounce of power out of hardware”. Beyond local LLM stuff, there’s basically nothing a modern computer can comfortably do that any laptop since the mainstreaming of SSDs can’t.

> In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me.

Gotta tack on to this thread showing appreciation for parents. We could never afford new computers in the 90s, but luckily my dad could bring home obsolete equipment from work. We were thus always at least a generation behind. I remember my friend's Pentium feeling like sci-fi compared to our 386, but my goodness it completely molded my life!

Later, towards the end of the 90s, those sci-fi Pentiums were obsolete, so I got a few to run "that weird Linux stuff" on. Since it was considered junk, nobody cared what I did with it. To this day, if I happen to hear Metallica play and there's early winter's first smell of snow in the air, my mind will be transported back to that school night I secretly stayed up wayyy too late and discovered SSH for the first time. Haven't looked back.

Thank you, dad! I just hope general computing devices owned by regular people are still natural by the time my children come of age.

John Dvorak has tons of short sighted articles.

I wanted to link his columns "Microsoft Dot Nyet" and "New Architecture Needed" from circa 2000-2001 but it turns out they have been memory-holed. They should be somewhere in the wayback machine.

EDIT: At least one of them has not been deleted, just his name has been removed

https://www.pcmag.com/archive/new-architecture-needed-32570

> My parents didn't have a lot of money ...

Mine neither although the grandparents were moderately wealthy but my mom understood very early on that it was a match for me and that computers would really take off.

Fun story: first BASIC I ever got was an Atari 2600 cartridge that came with some key of a "keyboard" in two parts you'd plug in the joystick ports. When my parent bought that Atari 2600 they tried it and spent the entire night playing "Tank Attack" on the TV in their bedroom. She only told me that years later.

Then as I was writing tiny BASIC programs on the Atari 2600 gaming console, she realized I needed a "real" computer, so she bought me an Atari 600 XL a bit later. Then I began salivating on the neighbours' Commodore 64, which I could see trough a window. And she thought: "If I buy the exact same computer as the neighbours, maybe my son and the neighbours shall become friends!". 42 years later one of our neighbor just went to visit my brother in another country and his brother we exchange Telegram messages nearly daily.

Then the Amiga. Then the 386, 486, etc.

What a mom. RIP.

My mother was a stenographer. She used a 286 for processing docs. That baby wasssss alll mine during the day!!! All my friends had hacks for sys/bat/exe files to get wolfenstein at least to load. Best days of my life.

Wonderful gift, even though I gave it a pass and saved on the sound card.

Mine was the 486 DX 2/66.

The trouble with the 486 SX 25 was IMO that a fast 386 easily beat it. I was part of the demo scene back then and wanted to compete with the likes of Dust, Future Crew.

And: Doom! It could be displayed and run in 800x600 if I remember correctly on a DX 2/66.

The DX/2 66 is a true legend of a chip. It was so good. The final nail in the coffin for the Amiga and for 68k. I love the Amiga, but it just didn’t Doom.

Before it, you could claim that a 68040 was kinda-sorta keeping up with the 486 and that the nicer design and better operating systems of other computers made up for the delta in raw performance, but the DX/2 66 running Doom was the final piece of proof that the worse-is-better approach of using raw CPU grunt to blast pixels at screen memory instead of relying on clever custom circuitry was winning.

Faced with overwhelming evidence, everyone sold their Amiga 1200s and jumped ship to that hated Wintel platform.

Slightly before DOOM came out, the killer 486 app for me was Fractint (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractint)

I distinctly remember having a Strike Commander poster in my bedroom saying “Strike really flies on a 486 DX/2”. Fond memories indeed.

Doom was released end of '93. In 1992 most of us were in the 286 -> 386 upgrade wave and a 486-33 was easily at $2.5k+ ($5.5k in today's terms). The 486 DX2 66 was a good choice even 1994-1996.

I wonder, I wonder where one could find a good book about the software architecture of that game… oh, well

They need to bring back the turbo button.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_Local_Bus for the younger crowd.

My first Intel based PC was actually a 486DX/2-66 “Houdini” card for my PowerMac 6100/60 in late 1994. It had a SB16 daughtercard and could either share RAM with the host Mac or use a 32MB dedicated SIMM. I added a dedicate SIMM when prices dropped to $300 for it.

...and with 8 MB (-eight- for the youngsters ;-) RAM you were absolutely the king ruler :-D

It's hard to convey to today's generation, who think Ivy Bridge to Haswell was a big jump or whatever, how awesome the 286 -> 386 -> 486 changes were to personal computing. It felt almost like what going from a NES to a Super Nintendo to a N64 felt like. The improvements were astounding.

Amazing to see a webpage "Updated Dec 1998" still up, running and displaying correctly.

I remember trying to run a game, Rise of the Triad, which was built with an improved Wolfenstein engine iirc, and having it struggle on my 386 unless I made the viewport as small as possible. At which point it told me to buy a 486... well I did eventually, I guess it worked.

and dont forget _legendary_ RHIDE dev environment!

https://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/gnu/www/directory/all/rhide.html

:-)

And you could use VESA linear framebuffer above 256KB - this was a breakthrough back then :-))

It was really the 386 that was the beginning of modern computing, since it had a mmu.

Friend of mine is still rocking a 1st gen retina MacBook Pro (from 2012) for music production!

Yeah but the first LCD screens sucked. Poor color rendition and not usable for gaming. In the early 2000s you were better off sticking with your CRT.

It's great Python is/was well supported on i686. Node on the other hand almost immediately started requiring SSE2 even in the earliest versions. Have not found success with Node + Pentium III yet, maybe need to build an earlier version myself.

I think the turning-point was that flat-framebuffers and plenty of CPU-power for the first time eclipsed specialized 2d hardware (Amiga,Megadrive, Snes, etc).

Flat framebuffers and "powerful" CPU's also enabled easier software rendering (Doom/Duke) of 3d, compared to the Amiga where writing textured rendering for an Amiga is a PITA due to video memory layout with separted bitplanes spreading bits of each pixel into different memory locations (the total memory bandwidth reduction in 1985 by using 5 or 6 bitplanes became a fatal bottleneck at this point).

It wasn't really always full framerate though and the 2d chipsets did help in "classic" actiongames that were still much in the rage.

The Pentium further widened the gap, but at the same time consoles gained hardware 3d acceleration (PSX/Saturn/Jaguar) yet the Pentium could do graphics better in some respects (As shown with Quake).

Once 3d accelerators landed, PC's has more or less constantly been ahead apart from when it comes to price (and comfort/ease).

WordStar originally didn’t have a spell checker. It was an add in product. And even after SpellStar was integrated (a response to the NewStar clone’s built-in spell checker), it was never as-you-type spell checking, which is what we got in Word 97, and what consumed the cycles on a 486.

Word 97 also had as-you-type grammar checking, which wordstar never had. Wordstar did have an add in extra cost grammar checker whose name escapes me at the moment. But again, it was never real time.

Yes, programs have become bloated, but it is worth it to compare apples to apples.

One might argue that real time isn’t necessary, and one might be right. But that’s different from poorly written.

>This chip was originally introduced in 1989, was replaced by the first Intel Pentium in 1993, and was fully discontinued in 2007

That's really long compared to 1yr refresh cycles we have today with phones etc.

I can understand running an old 486 machine for nostalgia reasons, or because you have some old industrial equipment that relies on it and even one second spent replacing it is a second too many, but I struggle to imagine why you'd want or need to run a modern Linux kernel on it.

Having qemm386 solved the issue. I think MSDOS 6 had something like it too.

don't forget the original Command&Conquer

> and it still takes too long to open the bloated Web browser! - keenly awaiting Ladybird to the rescue in August

chromium browsers launch pretty fast. If you're talking about memory usage, Ladybird isn't aimed at minimal memory usage from what I've seen.

I remember compiling Linux Kernel on SuSE 6.3 on a AMD 486DX5 133mhz ... good times , and I don't forget to do "make mrpropper"

Wouldn't the DX2 be 66 MHz? Or did you intentionally run it at 33 MHz?

I too have one sitting on my desk, 486DX2 66Mhz. I've had it for probably 25 years now, bringing it from job to job like the magical lost artifact it is. I remember how much more capable it was for playing Doom and Descent than the 33Mhz, or heaven forbid the SX. Of course shortly after the Pentium came out and blew everything away. The good 'ol days of giant Gateway 2000 towers.

I've got an AMD branded 286 chip, from my first owned-by-me PC, bluetac-ed to the case of my home desktop PC, powered by a Ryzen something-or-other from a few years ago (with a 1060/6Gb card from a few years before that because I wasn't gaming enough to justify a new graphics card along with the other updates at the time).

My experience too, as I dimly remember it.

The 486 SX was a fine chip, just no math copro.

The 386 SX was a crap, 16 bit wide bus IIRC.

On the other end, you have people who have no idea how insanely fast computers are today, and how little computing power is "really" needed for most things that computer users do - or how much you can do with one average machine ("Oh no, 1000 requests per second - let's erect another rube goldberg machine to handle that!").

It's easy to mock in hindsight, but the failure mode isn't lack of imagination. It's extrapolating linearly from physical limits that were real at the time. In 1989, DRAM refresh cycles and bus bandwidth genuinely were bottlenecks that seemed fundamental. What nobody predicted was that the industry would sidestep those walls entirely (caches, pipelines, out-of-order execution, then multicore). Architectural innovation tends to appear orthogonally to wherever the current wall is.

The first 80286-based system (IBM PC AT), 80386 (Compaq Deskpro 386), and 80486 all had people writing about their suitability as servers, with the consensus's implication being that normal people didn't need them.

The Pentium is the first one, I think, that this didn't happen, because by then it turned out that people need a computer that can do what they are currently doing—but faster—much more often than they need servers.

That's not so different than today, wherein:

All we really have to look forward to in the future of increasing-performance personal computing is doing the same things as yesterday, but doing them faster.

The future after today will probably turn out more interesting than that, of course, but we can't know that until it happens.

And the future after 1988 certainly turned out to be a very interesting time in computing -- but they had no idea what was in store. Perhaps you can use your time machine to go back and let them know?

Um. That never happened. No-one ever felt that. Not a soul.

Everyone - everyone knew it was the start of a revolution.

While the speed increases weren't as dramatic, do note that even in single core speed, unlike the clocks would suggest the Ryzen 7 is much, much more than 1.23X faster than the P4. The P4 was a particularly fragile architecture, and achieved IPC on real code was typically well below 1, often closer to 0.5. The x3d variants of Ryzen have been measured at running above 3 average IPC on real, complex loads. So the single-core uplift from that P4 to a modern AMD core is about the same as from that 300MHz Pentium to the 3.8 P4, it just took 20 years, not 8. Of course, now we also have 8 times the cores.

> How was the person incorrect that speed increases won't continue forever?

Through the magic of saying something different in actuality, which really ended up being proven incorrect. From the blogpost above, verbatim, italicizing the relevant bits:

> Writing in the May 8, 1989 issue of Infoworld, Michael Slater warned that the sixfold speed increase seen from 1981 to 1989, going from 5 MHz to 33 MHz, would not be repeated.

Clock speeds used to be going up in a straight line (the normal "interpretation" of Moore's law) - but once the P4 hit a (kind of useless 3.8GHz) we leveled off for decades.

A switch from the exponential regime to something immensely slower was a qualitative change. The difference is so vast that it's completely reasonable to say that clock speeds haven't changed a single bit since 2006 or so (and even for raw ops/s speeds, which have improved much more, it's debatable).