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Comment by ch_123 | Hacker News Reader

What you are saying is true, but it's also worth keeping in mind that the 8086 was already three years old by the time the first IBM showed up, and the 286 was launched only a few months after the IBM PC.

That was part of the reason why the 286 ended up with the "braindead chip" reputation - it was designed before the IBM PC and DOS showed up, and thus the inability to easily switch between real and protected mode was not seen as a big problem at the time it was designed.

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Exactly - the winning OS was MS-DOS and successors and so the 8086 went to the 80386 because nothing "famous" really used the 286 capabilities (Windows 286 aside).

I think what people tend to miss is that it took a very long time for that to happen. It took until the early 90s for the 386 to get cheap enough to start outselling the 286. Even after Intel dropped it, AMD and Harris kept releasing versions that were faster and cheaper than the low-end 386es.

Yes, my 386SX 20Mhz with hopping 2MB and a 40MB HDD was about 1 500 euros in 1990, when the minimum wage was around 300 euros.

It was bought via credit and if I make the inflation calculation for today's money it would be a big pile of notes.

And that would be obsolete by 1994.

Yep, bought a Pentium 66 MHz in 1995 with 8 MB, around the same price.

Same machine, investment was so big that my dad had to ask for a payroll advance from his boss, given I was struggling with Pascal (and my then computer was a Vic20). Turns out the boss had studied in the same college I was in, his answer was: "Whatever your kid need".

And that's how I got my hands on a 386sx. Around 1992 I installed Xenix and became a Unix nerd.

I love you, dad.

And OS/2.

OS/2 was always tied to the 80286. Even 2.0 still used 16bit device drivers, and used the 16bit stuff at its core.

Oh, wow, I'd never put the timeline together like that. Yes, that makes the 286 make much more sense!

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