4 Nov
2011
4 Nov
'11
9 a.m.
On 11/04/2011 12:41 AM, David Riley wrote:
Yeah. The 80386 isn't a *terrible* processor on its own (ok, nowhere
near what I'd consider "good", but it's usable) but when hamstrung by
the amateurish, short-sighted, hackish PC systems-level architecture
things get much worse.
It seems a lot of those things have been corrected over the years,
with the architecture slowly diverging from the original. Maybe in a
few more years it'll be to about the level of, say, a SPARCstation of
fifteen years ago.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
New Kensington, PA
I agree 100%!
The 386i was a weird machine, but I miss mine. Fun
stuff. I liked the idea of an 80386-based system that didn't even
try to be "PC compatible" because that wasn't what they were
looking to create.
Agreed; more of the same might put me off my general distaste for the
8086 architecture. I have a hard time getting behind a platform that
still has such an awful hack as the A20 gate built into it. I found
out what that BIOS setting meant (and the history behind it) when I
was trying to boot OpenBSD on a machine with a wonky A20
implementation emulation, and I was actually enraged (still am, to an
extent).