6 Aug
2025
6 Aug
'25
3:29 p.m.
On Wed, 6 Aug 2025, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote:
40 years ago this year Intel came out with the 80386 –
386 – or i386.
Either seems to be correct. What this meant was a memory address of 4GB,
far beyond what an average computer user would need or want, but was so
much more than previously(8086, 80286); ‘true’ multi-tasking which for the
average computer user didn’t mean all that much; and paging, which made
virtualization possible- experimenters were over-joyed! What all this
contributed to was the end of the classical/vintage-computing era. Whether
this began the time of open-source OS development is debatable!
Well, the very same year MIPS Computer Systems came up with the R2000, a
classic RISC design, featuring a(n almost) non-interlocked pipeline design
and with the same 4GiB paged virtual addressing capability and memory
protection also giving true multitasking. A processor architecture the
descendants of which live in millions of devices around the world, and
which inspired other architectures such as DEC Alpha or more recently
RISC-V.
Maciej