*updating* 8088's

On 20 Nov 2007 at 10:03, Ethan Dicks wrote: No doubt (I probably used a lot of it). But how much was available at the debut of the 386sx? The PC world took an extraordinarily long time to fully embrace 32-bit code. In 1989, there was Windows/386, but that was about it from Microsoft--and it wasn't wildly popular. I remember packages such as 386max, but those weren't applications per se, just operating enhancements. Even Windows 3.0 was a full year away in 1989. OS/2 2.0 was 3 years off; Windows NT was 4 years away (and I wouldn't call 3.0 a 32-bit bit OS because it could load 32-bit VxDs). That was pretty lame for a CPU feature that had been available to the public since 1986--and known, more or less accurately, by vendors for at least a year prior to that. Maybe the "16 BIT S/W ONLY" chips didn't help either. In 1989 most protected-mode code was 16-bit. I recall an Intel application engineer moaning about this at the time. I suspect a fair number of people grabbed a 386sx because they thought it would make things run faster--or for the hype. Cheers, Chuck