Discussion Obsolete and Obsolescent: i286/386/486

[jnjnilson6]

Have any of you still got Intel 286/386/486 chips and systems running Win 3.11 for Workgroups or Windows 95 in the world of vintage hardware?

Even if you have not the chips currently in your possession: was there a time in which you did? What interesting stories regarding the aforementioned hardware and practicableness and vigorous abandon peculiar to the nocturnal hours could you consider to share?

If you've only had such systems for a point in time or for a while, do write about your experience!

Thank you!

 

[USAFRet]

I've had all of those. And earlier.
I might still have the original AST shipping box for a 486SX system.

As time went on, they were all passed to lower need users. Or the Great Recycling Bin in the Sky.

 

[jnjnilson6]

I've had all of those. And earlier.
I might still have the original AST shipping box for a 486SX system.

As time went on, they were all passed to lower need users. Or the Great Recycling Bin in the Sky.

I bet some airplanes still use even weaker stuff, perhaps even 8086 for particular tasks.

The fact an airport would use Windows 3.11 in modern days and depend majorly upon it is frightening. https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-23-year-old-windows-3-1-system-failure-crashed-paris-airport/

 

[USAFRet]

I bet some airplanes still use even weaker stuff, perhaps even 8086 for particular tasks.

The fact an airport would use Windows 3.11 in modern days and depend majorly upon it is frightening. https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-23-year-old-windows-3-1-system-failure-crashed-paris-airport/

Seeing as a LOT of currently flying aircraft were designed in the 1980's or before, not unusual.
Systems in aircraft are completely different than what you have on your desk.

 

[jnjnilson6]

Seeing as a LOT of currently flying aircraft were designed in the 1980's or before, not unusual.
Systems in aircraft are completely different than what you have on your desk.

Yes, of course. The software within should be written perfectly (nearly perfectly). Changing hardware and rewriting the software often could have deadly consequences in the sky. When something works beautifully it can work like that for a long time.

 

[USAFRet]

Yes, of course. The software within should be written perfectly (nearly perfectly). Changing hardware and rewriting the software often could have deadly consequences in the sky. When something works beautifully it can work like that for a long time.

Changing hardware and its software in aircraft is FAR more cost intensive than people think.

And...if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

What a 50 year old aircraft looks like:

 

[jnjnilson6]

Changing hardware and its software in aircraft is FAR more cost intensive than people think.

And...if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

What a 50 year old aircraft looks like:

That's one hell of a beaut.

Reminds me a little of IL2 Sturmovik 1946 - an exigent, breathless, wonderful simulator. Was never really good at it and had played it before many years.

I do not know which one should feel more comfortable flying in - an old plane or a new one. The new one may harbor (although very rarely) design flaws which have heretofore remained unnoticed; the old plane has undergone much repair and nobody really knows at what particular point in time somebody fixed something wrongly or half-conscientiously only. It's a coin toss in the end.

 

[Eximo]

I didn't keep any of my 486/386 hardware. Progress was too swift to think much about keeping it around. No need to keep the 210MB hard drive when you could get 6.4GB, etc, then a few years later, 20, 40, and 80GB drives.

My first PC was a 486 with a Pentium overdrive chip in it. Made mostly of used components. Monitor and drives came from some local company auction. My brother worked at an electronics retailer at the time and got a pretty good deal on the CPU if I recall. I added memory until it had 16MB. Had a 1MB video card and a Voodoo2, eventually SLI, which meant it could run pretty much any glide game at the time.

I still have a dual Pentium and dual PII around. Pentium is an old HP server with 11 SCSI disks, I guess it does have a 486, but that is the main processor on the RAID card. The Dual PII runs Windows 2000 off of a pair of SCSI drives. I put a Voodoo 5 in that for no reason. Also has a pretty high end AWE32 that I don't think was ever in my 486. Pretty sure I had an ASOUND knock off card, and that may have been the only new part purchased for that machine.

I've mostly moved over to emulation for everything else. Which I need to get back into, been a while since I did much in the way of retro gaming.

If you are interested in that sort of thing there is a fairly large organization. Several major events per year in various locations.

Vintage Computer Federation – VCF — A organization for vintage computer enthusiasts

vcfed.org

 

[jnjnilson6]

I didn't keep any of my 486/386 hardware. Progress was too swift to think much about keeping it around. No need to keep the 210MB hard drive when you could get 6.4GB, etc, then a few years later, 20, 40, and 80GB drives.

My first PC was a 486 with a Pentium overdrive chip in it. Made mostly of used components. Monitor and drives came from some local company auction. My brother worked at an electronics retailer at the time and got a pretty good deal on the CPU if I recall. I added memory until it had 16MB. Had a 1MB video card and a Voodoo2, eventually SLI, which meant it could run pretty much any glide game at the time.

I still have a dual Pentium and dual PII around. Pentium is an old HP server with 11 SCSI disks, I guess it does have a 486, but that is the main processor on the RAID card. The Dual PII runs Windows 2000 off of a pair of SCSI drives. I put a Voodoo 5 in that for no reason. Also has a pretty high end AWE32 that I don't think was ever in my 486. Pretty sure I had an ASOUND knock off card, and that may have been the only new part purchased for that machine.

I've mostly moved over to emulation for everything else. Which I need to get back into, been a while since I did much in the way of retro gaming.

If you are interested in that sort of thing there is a fairly large organization. Several major events per year in various locations.

Vintage Computer Federation – VCF — A organization for vintage computer enthusiasts

vcfed.org

Thank you for sharing! Had had a Pentium II 450 MHz myself; it was quite fast. But the Tualatin Celeron 1.3 GHz pummeled it down in terms of performance.

Had had servers on fanless Pentium IIIs and Debian 6; great little machines!

Would be interesting if we could try and render games like Crysis on a 486 CPU. A single frame would probably take awhile. Next year would mark 18 years since Crysis' release; and going 18 years further backward we would land in 1989 - the release of the i486.

Say a Pentium 4 at 2800 MHz achieves 20 FPS in Crysis on Low settings with enough RAM and a very good video card. A 25 MHz 486DX (not counting in the innumerable technologies for faster computation the P4 retains) should achieve 0.18 frames per second or 1 frame per 5.5 seconds.

Now that's only theoretical because we haven't a motherboard supporting 486 CPUs which would support Crysis' RAM requirements and a graphics card fast enough to play the game, let alone overpower the CPU to the point the game is readily playable...

 

[Eximo]

That was the era of memory expansion cards, and 486 could technically have 4GB of ram. Would just need a particular motherboard and/or some massive memory chips on a card.

Something like the Geforce 6200 256MB PCI supported DX9 so was enough for the minimum.

Apparently Windows 2000 will run on a 486 and that would support DX9 as well.

I doubt it would run well, but it could probably be done.

 

[USAFRet]

Apparently Windows 2000 will run on a 486 and that would support DX9 as well.

Could you make it run?
Probably.

But, outside of a curiosity....Why?

 

[jnjnilson6]

That was the era of memory expansion cards, and 486 could technically have 4GB of ram. Would just need a particular motherboard and/or some massive memory chips on a card.

Something like the Geforce 6200 256MB PCI supported DX9 so was enough for the minimum.

Apparently Windows 2000 will run on a 486 and that would support DX9 as well.

I doubt it would run well, but it could probably be done.

Funny thing ... Had had a GeForce 6200 TurboCache 256MB on a Pentium 4 520J system and Crysis ran ... very badly. Say about 15 FPS seemed great when reached.

That's a great bit of info! I think Crysis would run on WinXP and above though. WinXP would run it in DX9 Mode and Windows Vista in DX10.

 

[jnjnilson6]

That was the era of memory expansion cards, and 486 could technically have 4GB of ram. Would just need a particular motherboard and/or some massive memory chips on a card.

Something like the Geforce 6200 256MB PCI supported DX9 so was enough for the minimum.

Apparently Windows 2000 will run on a 486 and that would support DX9 as well.

I doubt it would run well, but it could probably be done.

Just checked up ... it may be possible to run Crysis on Win2000 judging by a few sources. I thought it would hardly be possible because back in the day, even before Crysis came out, I had Win2000 Professional and a lot of the newer software simply refused to run and required XP.

 

[jnjnilson6]

Could you make it run?
Probably.

But, outside of a curiosity....Why?

I have no good answer, but maybe for the thrill of swimming in crystalline high-quality waters and coruscating splashes of foam in the manner of hours frame after frame on a CPU which was meant to run games like Doom.

 

[USAFRet]

I have no good answer, but maybe for the thrill of swimming in crystalline high-quality waters and coruscating splashes of foam in the manner of hours frame after frame on a CPU which was meant to run games like Doom.

Similar:

Question - What vintage games from the year 2000 can run on 2 cores 64mb ram and 4mb vram?

I can't even look that up on google search

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[punkncat]

Why?

Why not?

😉

I don't mess with any of the 3/486 stuff, I do watch a couple of channels that do content on them. I am old enough to remember when they were the hotness. My first PC purchase was a bit later than this era.

 

[jnjnilson6]

Similar:

Question - What vintage games from the year 2000 can run on 2 cores 64mb ram and 4mb vram?

I can't even look that up on google search

forums.tomshardware.com

The greatest game (graphically) I was able to run on my first gaming PC (Celeron Tualatin 1.3 GHz / GeForce2 MX 400 with 64 MB dedicated memory / 256 MB RAM and 40 GB HDD) was Xpand Rally. It does not say in its requirements that the GeForce2 is supported at all, but it is.

The only problem is the game had a memory leak and after hours of gameplay the computer simply restarted (that's due to an issue with the OS itself / it should not restart like that even with memory leaks; however, I never had such restarts while running any other game or piece of software).

The game ran surprisingly well. The graphics aren't hideous, but quite surprisingly nice even today.

PS. The OS the game was run on proved Win2000 Professional.

 

[USAFRet]

Why not?

😉

I don't mess with any of the 3/486 stuff, I do watch a couple of channels that do content on them. I am old enough to remember when they were the hotness. My first PC purchase was a bit later than this era.

Why not?

I only have 2 hands, and only so much extra time per day.

In my stack of crap in the garage, I have a Pentium II laptop, and almost certainly a couple of earlier ones.
Could I resurrect them to booting up?
Yes.
And then do what? At best, hobbyist faffing about. Sure, but my hobbies are elsewhere.

 

[jnjnilson6]

Why not?

I only have 2 hands, and only so much extra time per day.

In my stack of crap in the garage, I have a Pentium II laptop, and almost certainly a couple of earlier ones.
Could I resurrect them to booting up?
Yes.
And then do what? At best, hobbyist faffing about. Sure, but my hobbies are elsewhere.

When you have slept and you have awoken and the baggage of a gone yesterday exuberantly flows like dark coffee in a mug you start working and work follows more work and the day passes drearily, and in the end, as you have said, you have only two hands and a tiresome reminiscence of the day's doings haunts and haunts ... So in the end we should pick out our hobbies with care; we have only so much time for them.

 

[Priscus]

My first PC was self assembled, constructed around the turn of the decade: 1980's/1990's

CPU was a 486. do not recall whether sx or dx variant.

Mobo ( do not recall manufacturer,) but was pre PCI: had a bunch of ISA slots

Had a Wang monochrome monitor, and a 'Hercules Graphics' video card.

OS was DOS 5.1, and I also had a DR DOS alternative.

World wide web had not become available to general public here, had a dial-up modem, and had to access coms either by via local university or a node operated by telephone company. I remember we used something called 'JANET', which was joint academic network, JANET still exists as one of the trunk systems constituting WWW.

I was an MBA student at the time, and we were required to submit our work online using MS 'Word' and comms software called 'Kermit'. (The former was prior to 'Word for Windows)

It was awful, and forever buggy and likely to fault. At the summer school, there was an IT help desk. the queues were so long, you had to decide which academic presentation to give a miss if you wanted to queue and avail yourself of the available help. My sole experience, I wanted to know if I could download a complete file rather than screenful at a time, as loss of connection often left me unable to continue. Alas, the IT helpdesk was unable to offer any answer to my question.

I had continued to use the system up to turn of the Century, as I had modified the carriage of a daisy wheel printer to drill the huge number of holes I need in printed circuit boards that I made. Although by then I had a Windows machine, it is far easer in DOS to export a few Bytes of data over the parallel printer port, which DOS could address directly. I used that to position my drill for the PCBs.

Demise of this system occurred in early years of this Century. The mobo did not have a bios battery per se, but used a RTC chip (which contained a battery that was claimed to last ten years) So, after about twenty years the RTC chip's battery expired. Replacement, or at least a substitute was available but given age of the machine I did not opt for such a replacement. It was also possible, at least in theory to simply strap a battery across the appropriate pins of the RTC chip.

The mobo held a buffer which used some static RAM chips, and when in need of some of the latter, I cannibalised them thus bringing the end to this 486 system.

 

[jnjnilson6]

My first PC was self assembled, constructed around the turn of the decade: 1980's/1990's

CPU was a 486. do not recall whether sx or dx variant.

Mobo ( do not recall manufacturer,) but was pre PCI: had a bunch of ISA slots

Had a Wang monochrome monitor, and a 'Hercules Graphics' video card.

OS was DOS 5.1, and I also had a DR DOS alternative.

World wide web had not become available to general public here, had a dial-up modem, and had to access coms either by via local university or a node operated by telephone company. I remember we used something called 'JANET', which was joint academic network, JANET still exists as one of the trunk systems constituting WWW.

I was an MBA student at the time, and we were required to submit our work online using MS 'Word' and comms software called 'Kermit'. (The former was prior to 'Word for Windows)

It was awful, and forever buggy and likely to fault. At the summer school, there was an IT help desk. the queues were so long, you had to decide which academic presentation to give a miss if you wanted to queue and avail yourself of the available help. My sole experience, I wanted to know if I could download a complete file rather than screenful at a time, as loss of connection often left me unable to continue. Alas, the IT helpdesk was unable to offer any answer to my question.

I had continued to use the system up to turn of the Century, as I had modified the carriage of a daisy wheel printer to drill the huge number of holes I need in printed circuit boards that I made. Although by then I had a Windows machine, it is far easer in DOS to export a few Bytes of data over the parallel printer port, which DOS could address directly. I used that to position my drill for the PCBs.

Demise of this system occurred in early years of this Century. The mobo did not have a bios battery per se, but used a RTC chip (which contained a battery that was claimed to last ten years) So, after about twenty years the RTC chip's battery expired. Replacement, or at least a substitute was available but given age of the machine I did not opt for such a replacement. It was also possible, at least in theory to simply strap a battery across the appropriate pins of the RTC chip.

The mobo held a buffer which used some static RAM chips, and when in need of some of the latter, I cannibalised them thus bringing the end to this 486 system.

Did you run only DOS or did you try Win3.11 or Windows 95/98 on the system too? The 486 would have done well on the latter too. Of course, it is not a Pentium, but it was very performant for its time nonetheless. Office 97 could run on a 486 and using Word in it ought to have been like night and day in comparison to synonymous applications in the deeper parallels of the past.

 

[Misgar]

What a 50 year old aircraft looks like:

I remember seeing the SR-71 Blackbird at an airshow. According to Wiki, its development was revealed to the public in 1964. That makes it 60 years old. Photo below from 1994.

My third home computer was an 8086. Next was an 80286 with Windows 2.0. I still have the Windows 3.11 floppy discs in a drawer. I probably scrapped most of my old 3.11 systems 12 years ago during a clear out.

 

[Priscus]

Did you run only DOS or did you try Win3.11 or Windows 95/98 on the system too? The 486 would have done well on the latter too. Of course, it is not a Pentium, but it was very performant for its time nonetheless. Office 97 could run on a 486 and using Word in it ought to have been like night and day in comparison to synonymous applications in the deeper parallels of the past.

Thanks for your comments.

I had only run DOS on this machine. Strangely enough, someone gave me a set of floppies containing W3.1 OS, but I never got around to using it: I would have needed to buy replacement Windows versions of the DOS apps that I had been using hitherto. Also the MBA course which I was pursuing at the time was so demanding of my time and effort that I did not want to be working along yet another learning curve in relation to the tec.

My first Windows machine was a second hand W98 SE, at turn of the century. (In fact a W95, with some retrofitted additions, and upgraded to run 98SE.) I had bought this for somebody else, but they did not use it, so I ended up taking up the machine. Using this for any general DOS applications left me able to use the 486 as a dedicated controller for my PCB drilling rig. This latter machine met the requirements for XP when it was released, but only just, so I upgraded to XP, which it ran only poorly, and eventually, I swapped out mobo and cpu for a 'Prescott' processor. This yielded a satisfactory XP machine, which I still have, and I think it still works though have not used it at all for a couple of years. It is only really the case that remains of the original device and even this is quite out of date. It was a cheapy, ALDI's computer (Medion brand) and I have had to radically modify the case to take the cooling fans now required. However, I have been reluctant to part with it, as I am so impressed with the standards of internal construction not a sharp edge anywhere: every edge every corner has been radiused. German Engineering at its best!

 

[jnjnilson6]

Thanks for your comments.

I had only run DOS on this machine. Strangely enough, someone gave me a set of floppies containing W3.1 OS, but I never got around to using it: I would have needed to buy replacement Windows versions of the DOS apps that I had been using hitherto. Also the MBA course which I was pursuing at the time was so demanding of my time and effort that I did not want to be working along yet another learning curve in relation to the tec.

My first Windows machine was a second hand W98 SE, at turn of the century. (In fact a W95, with some retrofitted additions, and upgraded to run 98SE.) I had bought this for somebody else, but they did not use it, so I ended up taking up the machine. Using this for any general DOS applications left me able to use the 486 as a dedicated controller for my PCB drilling rig. This latter machine met the requirements for XP when it was released, but only just, so I upgraded to XP, which it ran only poorly, and eventually, I swapped out mobo and cpu for a 'Prescott' processor. This yielded a satisfactory XP machine, which I still have, and I think it still works though have not used it at all for a couple of years. It is only really the case that remains of the original device and even this is quite out of date. It was a cheapy, ALDI's computer (Medion brand) and I have had to radically modify the case to take the cooling fans now required. However, I have been reluctant to part with it, as I am so impressed with the standards of internal construction not a sharp edge anywhere: every edge every corner has been radiused. German Engineering at its best!

Tell me about it. I had a gaming system in 2001 (Intel Celeron Tualatin 1.3 GHz / GeForce2 MX 400 w. 64 MB memory / 256 MB RAM / 40 GB HDD) which ran Red Hat Linux 7.3, Windows 2000 Professional and Windows 98 SE (could boot up any of the three; they were all installed on the drive). Basically it was a high-end gaming system in 2001, but by 2005 standards had shifted and the median amount of RAM had reached 1 GB, so 256 MB was literally obsolete only in the span of 4 years. Windows XP ran on the machine quite badly; however, when after many years I updated the RAM from 256 MB to 1.5 GB the difference was otherworldly and performance spiked up incalculably.

Had had a Pentium 4 520J, 1 GB RAM, GeForce 6200 TurboCache w/ 256 MB memory and 2x 160 GB Hitachi drives around 2005/2006. It ran well, but the P4 520J froze every 20 minutes (on one of the highest-end ASUS motherboards) and the system had to be manually restarted. In 2013 I bought about 12 Pentium 4 520s cheaply from Ebay and they had the same problem (freezing) on a Gigabyte motherboard and afterward - an MSI one. Finally, I bought an ASRock motherboard and that problem disappeared forever.

The GeForce 6200 TurboCache 256 MB could run 720p YouTube videos smoothly on Windows, and somehow, magically, 1080p on Linux. Those were the days... I remember getting a Celeron 420 1.6 GHz and overclocking it to 3.0 GHz stable - in which case it was faster than the P4 520 w/ Hyper-Threading at 2.8 GHz.

 

[Priscus]

Tell me about it. I had a gaming system in 2001 (Intel Celeron Tualatin 1.3 GHz / GeForce2 MX 400 w. 64 MB memory / 256 MB RAM / 40 GB HDD) which ran Red Hat Linux 7.3, Windows 2000 Professional and Windows 98 SE (could boot up any of the three; they were all installed on the drive). Basically it was a high-end gaming system in 2001, but by 2005 standards had shifted and the median amount of RAM had reached 1 GB, so 256 MB was literally obsolete only in the span of 4 years. Windows XP ran on the machine quite badly; however, when after many years I updated the RAM from 256 MB to 1.5 GB the difference was otherworldly and performance spiked up incalculably.

Had had a Pentium 4 520J, 1 GB RAM, GeForce 6200 TurboCache w/ 256 MB memory and 2x 160 GB Hitachi drives around 2005/2006. It ran well, but the P4 520J froze every 20 minutes (on one of the highest-end ASUS motherboards) and the system had to be manually restarted. In 2013 I bought about 12 Pentium 4 520s cheaply from Ebay and they had the same problem (freezing) on a Gigabyte motherboard and afterward - an MSI one. Finally, I bought an ASRock motherboard and that problem disappeared forever.

The GeForce 6200 TurboCache 256 MB could run 720p YouTube videos smoothly on Windows, and somehow, magically, 1080p on Linux. Those were the days... I remember getting a Celeron 420 1.6 GHz and overclocking it to 3.0 GHz stable - in which case it was faster than the P4 520 w/ Hyper-Threading at 2.8 GHz.

Cheers.

Yes, I had omitted to mention, but I also ran Red Hat at the time, though it was out of curiosity rather than being put to serious use. My friend, who often called round to visit, was an IT professional and holds a doctorate in the subject always used to tell me, "For heavens sake, switch to Linux: as someone who has used UNIX in the past it will be right up your street"!

So, I was dabbling with Linux when AMD released their first 64 bit CPU. I grabbed one and one of the boards made for enthusiasts by the now long gone Abit manufacturer. I then, of course needed a 64 bit OS. I had heard good things about SUSE, and was particularly impressed by the documentation, so that became my OS of choice for the next decade.