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Comment by Narishma | Hacker News Reader

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

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 And it had been superseded since 1985 at a time when PCs were never really fast enough.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.

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

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