Is there a case to be made for the 386?

[seaken]

Yes, a case can be made for the 386. But a lot of us waited for a 486 or Pentium. Our family business upgrade from the 8088 PC and DOS was the Pentium 75 and Windows 95. But I still ran a lot of DOS software. On my own (not directly in the family business fleet) I was given a "broken" AST Premium 486/33 and I used it for WordStar and QuatroPro for years as I resisted Windows. We skipped over the 386. Then I bought a used 386sx-16 and ran Windows 3.11 with Serif PagePlus and PFS:First Choice (a DOS program) and Quatro Pro and Alpha Four. All DOS programs except for the DTP program. I loved that system and use it for years even when I went to work for a printer who had MACs.

I still have that old 386sx but it is sick and not working. I do have an IBM PS/1 386sx-25 that I loaded Wfw 3.11 on and duplicated most of what I had on my old 386sx-16. But in the end I favored the 486 and eventually caved in to Windows programs that replaced my old DOS programs.

Seaken

 

[T-R-A]

Sample page from an August 1992 Computer Shopper. Typical prices for the day. At this time the 286's are on their way out, but still being sold. Win3.1 had just been released a few months before (it would still run on a 286, however). And people seem to forget that $2000 was a sizable chunk of money in those days, and few of those systems included a monitor, printer or other (by today's standard) "common" peripherals...

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Yeah I would have taken the 286 looking at that add.

That's kinda nuts that 286s were still being sold alongside 486s.

 

[seaken]

When I was looking for a computer to buy for my parents (not in the business) I chose the 286. The price was right, and I knew we would be using DOS. Yep, $2000 was lot, and the family business had already spent $3000-$4000 on our old PC and the same on the Advantage before that. When we upgraded to the Micron Pentium 75 it was also still over $2000 in about 1995. We were swayed by Windows 95 by then.

Seaken

 

[Chuck(G)]

Wasn't there also a PPC version of NT?

I think the 386SX was developed to fill the price gap between the 286 and 386-based systems. I had one and was underwhelmed by its performance. For some things, it actually felt slower than a 286.

 

[krebizfan]

Intel's initial samples for the 386 had 16-bit interfaces and plugged into a modified 286 motherboard. What would have been the 386SX was there from the beginning; Intel just couldn't produce enough 386s to divert any to the lower end of the market for years.

Of course, the clones of the 386SX like the 386SLC were amazing chips: fast, power efficient and cheap.

 

[Unknown_K]

I jumped from a 286-12 with 1MB to a 386DX/40 4MB system I built with mail order parts and the speed difference was amazing. Upgrading to 16MB of RAM and a IIt math coprocessor made Windows 3.1 run like a dream.

Kind of funny how 286/386/486 systems were being sold all at the same time for budget, mainstream, and bleeding edge users. Until Ryzen 3 or so came out Intel kept making new sockets and chipsets but the CPU were barely 5% faster generation to generation while the jump from 286, 386, 486 felt like a huge boost in speed.

 

[the3dfxdude]

I guess for me, the 286 @ 12MHz was where the speed of a PC started feeling tolerable. But they were very much treated as a cheap, DOS machine by me and most people when I was using one in 1990-1993. So I would consider the 286 kind of a baseline to the start of everything, because the 8088 was pretty slow Yes the 386, with its high speed variants, and populating its RAM slots was a huge boost and made Windows enjoyable. And the 486 was wild how much they boosted performance. I was doing a quick look at clockspeeds over the entire compatible range, and the increase in clock speeds really is unmatched. The Pentium socket 7 was pretty good, for other reasons, and the swing in range of clock speeds is also excellent, but not nearly as much. Moving out of the '90s, well, the rate of change really did start to slow down.

 

[Zare]

I've moved directly from 8088 to 486.
All the 286 386 meanwhile, have spent a few days at home, then moved to business environment. Due to circumstances my country found itself in, my dad couldn't afford to have a "modern" PC at home and on his company desk. The XT was there and usable. It's not until circumstances stopped, circa 1996, that I started building a semi-contemporary computers for myself out of parts provided by my father, starting with 486 SX. First Pentium in 1997. It wasn't until about 2001/2 that I've caught on with Pentium 4.

That's for home computer. Luckily I got opportunities to build 386s in my dad's company, so I wasn't completely oblivious.

 

[Zare]

I jumped from a 286-12 with 1MB to a 386DX/40 4MB system I built with mail order parts and the speed difference was amazing. Upgrading to 16MB of RAM and a IIt math coprocessor made Windows 3.1 run like a dream.

Kind of funny how 286/386/486 systems were being sold all at the same time for budget, mainstream, and bleeding edge users. Until Ryzen 3 or so came out Intel kept making new sockets and chipsets but the CPU were barely 5% faster generation to generation while the jump from 286, 386, 486 felt like a huge boost in speed.

That seems like amazing experience for the time.
Stuff I remember was Pentium 100 over DX4 75, in games such as FIFA 95 the non-frame-locked stuff such as aiming a corner kick felt like it's running at 100FPS+. And then a decade later first SSD drive for a quad Core 2 - that was a quantum leap.

 

[resman]

Wasn't there also a PPC version of NT?

I think the 386SX was developed to fill the price gap between the 286 and 386-based systems. I had one and was underwhelmed by its performance. For some things, it actually felt slower than a 286.

PPC and a few others, later. Alpha was an initial release target as I believe Cutler had a lot of input on its design.

My first startup was designing hybrid 386/MIPS R3000 NT workstations (switching to 486/MIPS R4000 when they became available). The 386 couldn't compete performance-wise with the RISC CPUs, but when the 486 became available, the balance was starting to shift. One of the program managers at MS suggested very strongly that we alter our business plan - they had seen a pre-release version of the Pentium and the R4000 was going to be a hard sell against it. And that's always been NTs problem - alternative architectures that could compete cost and performance wise with the Intel offerings.

I also run Windows NT 3.51 on Compaq 386/25. Very solid platform. If you look at the retail price of that machine back in 1988, its jaw dropping. You can understand why the 386sx was offered.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

I had a 286 and held off until the 486DX33 was out.

Likewise. IE, I upgraded the family's main PC, a 4.77mhz XT clone, to a 12mhz 80286 in... late 1988-early 1989 or so? and we stuck with that until... late 1991 or early 1992, skipping the 386 entirely. Our budget for the upgrade was less than two grand so we ended up ordering a 486/33 from one of those sketchy "make your own combo" ads in the back of computer shopper... you know, the ones that looked like this:



(I remember the price of the "barebones" 486/33 being closer to $1100 instead of $656, so based on that I'm going to guess that it was closer to 1991 than the August 1992 issue of Computer Shopper this came out of. There doesn't seem to be anything like a complete collection of these things online. To fit in budget the choices were to get the 486 with only 4MB of RAM and keep using the monitor we had on the 286, or get a 386 and go bigger on the RAM and a new monitor right away. In the end I think we made the right choice.)

From my experience I'd say skipping the 386 generation wasn't that unusual of a path. It wasn't for *quite a while* after the 386 came out that software that could really use it went mainstream, and prior to 1990 or so the price premium for a 386 was pretty significant. (When I upgraded the 8088 machine baby-AT size 386sx boards were already out, it was a path we could have taken, but the price premium for just the board was something like $400-$500; that was a lot considering that would about pay for a VGA card and monitor, or a decent size hard disk, or... whatever. And it also would have been kind of pointless without buying a lot more than the 1MB of RAM we got with the 286 board.) By the time software that really could use a 386 came out the first gen machines were only marginally fast enough to even run it, so... yeah, I don't think skipping them was a bad idea at all given the viability of DOS as an environment into the early 1990's.

I do get the feeling, though, that people on slightly different upgrade cadences, say those who got into the PC game from buying a Tandy 1000SX or something in 1987 instead of a 4.77mhz XT clone in 1984-ish, were probably prime candidates to end up on the 386 track. The price premium for a 486 looked worth it when we bought, but go back only a few months and it would have been around a thousand bucks instead of just a few hundred, a fast 386sx looks like a good choice under those conditions. For the most part I think both tracks end up converging sometime around early 1996, when between Windows 95 and the Internet a Pentium-class machine starts becoming a practical minimum. (The 486 owners bought a few months of suffering trying to make the old machine work, while the 386 people knew right away they were screwed.)

 

[h2ospa]

Likewise. IE, I upgraded the family's main PC, a 4.77mhz XT clone, to a 12mhz 80286 in... late 1988-early 1989 or so? and we stuck with that until... late 1991 or early 1992, skipping the 386 entirely. Our budget for the upgrade was less than two grand so we ended up ordering a 486/33 from one of those sketchy "make your own combo" ads in the back of computer shopper... you know, the ones that looked like this:

View attachment 1274940

(I remember the price of the "barebones" 486/33 being closer to $1100 instead of $656, so based on that I'm going to guess that it was closer to 1991 than the August 1992 issue of Computer Shopper this came out of. There doesn't seem to be anything like a complete collection of these things online. To fit in budget the choices were to get the 486 with only 4MB of RAM and keep using the monitor we had on the 286, or get a 386 and go bigger on the RAM and a new monitor right away. In the end I think we made the right choice.)

From my experience I'd say skipping the 386 generation wasn't that unusual of a path. It wasn't for *quite a while* after the 386 came out that software that could really use it went mainstream, and prior to 1990 or so the price premium for a 386 was pretty significant. (When I upgraded the 8088 machine baby-AT size 386sx boards were already out, it was a path we could have taken, but the price premium for just the board was something like $400-$500; that was a lot considering that would about pay for a VGA card and monitor, or a decent size hard disk, or... whatever. And it also would have been kind of pointless without buying a lot more than the 1MB of RAM we got with the 286 board.) By the time software that really could use a 386 came out the first gen machines were only marginally fast enough to even run it, so... yeah, I don't think skipping them was a bad idea at all given the viability of DOS as an environment into the early 1990's.

I do get the feeling, though, that people on slightly different upgrade cadences, say those who got into the PC game from buying a Tandy 1000SX or something in 1987 instead of a 4.77mhz XT clone in 1984-ish, were probably prime candidates to end up on the 386 track. The price premium for a 486 looked worth it when we bought, but go back only a few months and it would have been around a thousand bucks instead of just a few hundred, a fast 386sx looks like a good choice under those conditions. For the most part I think both tracks end up converging sometime around early 1996, when between Windows 95 and the Internet a Pentium-class machine starts becoming a practical minimum. (The 486 owners bought a few months of suffering trying to make the old machine work, while the 386 people knew right away they were screwed.)

This "make your own combo" thing still exist in many parts of the world. The companies would build the computer for you based on your selection, and then ship it to you (or
in-store pickup) in a single box. Many times doing it that way would be cheaper than buy the parts and assemble myself.

Somehow it is no longer an option in the U.S.

 

[wrljet]

Don't Newegg and Micro Center still do those custom builds?

 

[Agent Orange]

Wasn't there also a PPC version of NT?

I think the 386SX was developed to fill the price gap between the 286 and 386-based systems. I had one and was underwhelmed by its performance. For some things, it actually felt slower than a 286.

I agree with that one, but I have an AM386/40 that runs as good as some of the early 486's.

 

[alank2]

One thing that would be fascinating to know is clock for clock, what is about the average speed increase by processor generation. Something like 486 vs. 386, clock for clock is 50% faster for example.

 

[krebizfan]

The 486 gained its performance through the internal cache. The 386 variants with internal cache got a similar boost. The 386SX was an overpriced slug; the 386SLC was the budget chip of dreams.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

One thing that would be fascinating to know is clock for clock, what is about the average speed increase by processor generation. Something like 486 vs. 386, clock for clock is 50% faster for example.

On synthetic benchmarks like Dhrystone MIPS a 486 can score almost 3x faster, clock for clock, than a 386; granted that spread usually didn't translate to the real world. A little under 2x was closer to reality for tasks that were too big to fit in the 486's onboard cache.

 

[Agent Orange]

One thing that would be fascinating to know is clock for clock, what is about the average speed increase by processor generation. Something like 486 vs. 386, clock for clock is 50% faster for example.

I not sure about direct competition as surely, the 486, would win that battle hands down. But the cost of the 80486, at least in the home market, was almost cost prohibitive in the early to mid 90's. My first 486 was a i486SX/25 and it was somewhat of a dog in performance. I think it was shortly thereafter that I went with whatever AMD had to offer. AMD let you upgrade your chip without the expense of a new motherboard. Of course, Intel more or less maintained a slight lead in performance down the road until most recently. The AM386/40 was an affordable alternative in the early going. The game changer, in my belief, was the the Core 2.

 

[Chuck(G)]

My Intel keyfob has both chips--the 80386 and the 80486 encapsulated in resin for the ages. The surprising thing is the difference in size between the two--the 486 die looks to be almost 4x the area of the 80386.