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Comment by nicetryguy | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking that you need a 386 minimum with extended memory to run the earliest versions of Linux but yeah no nevermind it's a Raspberry Pi...

286's were pretty ancient by 89 anyway. The first 486 was released that same year.

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The 286 was still extremely popular by the early 90s, even if it was first released a decade or so earlier.

They didn't chew up as much power so you did find them in lower budget laptops like the one in the article.

Doubtless there were still systems around. But the 80286 had a very weird sort of virtual memory architecture--not that it mattered too much pre mainstream true virtual memory OS support. And it had been superseded since 1985 at a time when PCs were never really fast enough.

In college 486s were getting very dated. We still maintained an 8086 ibm xt lab for typing classes. Maintaining those machines was something

I would be genuinely interested in a multi-decade grid of what various price points bought in inflation-adjusted dollars by year for say, dell or compaq/hp over the years, say for price points in increments of $500.

Like my rock-bottom "Workforce 486" that was $2000 back in 1993 or so: 486 dx2/66, 250MB HDD, 4MB RAM ordered from the back of Computer Shopper.

The 286 used segmentation where you could carve out contiguous regions in ram and select them using the 16bit segment registers. Going outside the segment would cause an interrupt but individual pages and page faults weren't possible until the 386.

We used the segment mode for our real time OS in university as it was simpler than virtual addressing and provided granular enough protection faults for what we were doing.

One neat thing we did with it was use separate segments for different video buffers before they were blitted to the VESA frame buffer region. This gave us a 1980's version of video sandboxing along with vsync'ed double buffering and overlapping windows.

It only really worked because the Pentium 3 we were using could memcpy something like ten thousand times faster than a 286 but it was still cool.

Yes, I remember buying a second-hand Tulip Vanilla 286 for a princely £700 in 1990. PCs were not cheap in those days.

Yea, they were a great $999 PC in the very early 90’s. As long as you didn’t want to run Windows they were popular.

Some windows versions support the 286, perhaps win 3.0?

Windows 3.1 will run on a 286. But you really need 2-4mb for it to be usable and running stuff like Word or Excel will bring it to its knees.

I clicked because Linux needed an 386: the first versions used 4Kb memory pages for virtual memory instead of the i286 segmentation.

I had a IBM PS/2 286 with, IIRC, 4MB RAM, 30MB HD and one 3.5" floppy disk, bought 2nd hand in 1992 where I played Monkey Island 2 and several other games. So, maybe it was ancient but newer PCs were so expensive back in the day that there were people still happily using it.

Yes. My first x86 computer was a 25MHz 386 bought in 1991. Even though 486's were available, it was still the envy of the kids at school. (For a very short time.) I remember seeing some 486 systems advertised for $4-5k, which in 1991 dollars was out of reach of most people. So I can completely believe a 286 would have been a fine laptop in 1989.

It wasn't like today, where if you're going to buy a new computer, you might as well always get the latest and greatest.

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