[GEEK] I worked mainly with 286 computers way back in 1988 and 386 models were considered top of the range. I even remember when the 486 came out in 1989 - woo...
The company I worked for dealt primarily with Toshiba laptops. Back in the late 80's these cost THOUSANDS ££££££! I'm pretty sure a Toshiba T5200 486 equipped lap top cost something like £3 - £4K
Anyway, that means my 1986 45S Uno is a 286 and my 2x 1989 70SX Unos are 486s.
God I feel old
[/GEEK]
The thing that always makes me shiver is the memory of a conversation I had with a computer specialist in 1991 (even though the 486 was released in 1989), talking about which processor to get (building my first PC, which I never actually did and bought an Amiga instead). At $500 the 80286 processor was "perfectly adequate for all normal duties, like word processing and games" and the i386 processor ($1100) was "only for advanced CAD/CAM work and engineering models". In 'DX' form, the 386 had 32-bit memory access, and don't forget the 80387 maths coprocessor too. The computational power was unprecedented in a desktop machine - it would be at least 40x faster than my C64, and the possibilities with all that power were endless and so exciting, you could literally design a better Lotus Esprit chassis, or work out how to fly to the moon. Universities were gearing up with this equipment for the next generation of engineers and researchers to pass through their gates (i.e., me).
Anyway the chilling truth was seeing loads of
486s chucked out just five years later in 1996. Since they had at least twice the computational power of the 386, it made me wonder how many of those 486s had actively seen duty in advanced CAD/CAM work and engineering models. More likely, their owners became sick of waiting for Windows 95 to start.
Meanwhile, I think around this time there was a paradigm shift towards the use of 'media' on a PC. Suddenly, what was previously sufficient to model astrophysics and do a finite element analysis was no longer enough to load Encarta and play a 160x120 video clip in 256 colours. And then even a five-year-old kid knows your 386 PC sucks.
By the time I got to Uni, no-one really cared what processor a PC used any more... Pentium II, or III, AMD K6, so what...
One thing is for certain in this world - you pay a lot to be on the bleeding edge, and you'd better make sure you draw blood while you're there.
-Alex
