4 Aug
2006
4 Aug
'06
3:24 p.m.
I perfer
to work with older systems (386s are fun!) [...]
I am curious as to what is
'fun' about 386s (I assume you mean PC
compatibles, and not, for example, Sequent multi-processor machines). So the real low-level hardware/software
hackability of these machines
would seem to be little different from a more modern PC.
I'm not so sure.
While I've never tried, I'd lay decent odds that it's a good deal
easier to cobble together a working ISA board than a working PCI board. Also, wasn't 386 instruction execution time
predictible to the
clock-cycle level (as opposed to more recent machines with caches and
I thought even the 8086 did some pre-fetching of instructions. Which
means even that chip is less predicatable than, say, a Z80.
And, of course, it's entirely possible that
16-year-old happens to be
emotionally attached to 386s for reasons completely unrelated to their
technical merits or lack thereof - perhaps there's some cherished game
Sure. That's why I'm curious about why he's interested in such machines.
-tony