Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

The 486 was such a massive improvement over the 386. And the DX2/66 felt like almost as big of an improvement over the 25/33MHz 486's.

The 486 landscape was weird. You had crippled, 386-like versions such as the 486DLC/SLC, Intel's DX4's that hit 75 or 100MHz, and clones that went up to somewhere around 133MHz (by this time the Pentiums had hit the streets, so the 486's on steroids were for budget users). And they were often given similar sounding names to the 586, to further confuse buyers.

It was amazing, and infuriating, to have your decently high-end system basically obsoleted in two generations. And, the DOS to Windows transition didn't help matters. It seems really odd in a time where you could still be using a 10 year old i7 and be just fine.

View on HN

Ahh, my first PC after jumping ship from the Amiga like a filthy traitor, but having to accept facts that Commodore was dying and PC taking the market by storm. During the 386 days I honestly think it was still so immature for gaming that the Amiga still felt better, but by 486 and when I switched there was no longer a contest although PC was still unfriendlier for games with the AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS and Conventional RAM acrobatics. It was funny, PC at this time felt like powerhouses but ancient at the same time, coming from the Amiga. Ancient powerhouses! It's like they had recently discovered 16 bit sound, like... what...

But anyway, I jumped on board with the 486 DX2/66 which was the bee's knees. After a year or two, I overclocked it to 80 MHz to run Duke Nukem 3D or Quake or whatever for a _very precious_ +5 fps or so because your framerate was often in the 20 fps range. Made a huge difference. So 20% clock speed was big! I even upgraded to DX4/100 during a weekend of tinkering with my high school friends for another +20% and at that point FPS games of the time ran pretty well indeed! As well as the recent Windows 3.11 of course which was starting to feel like nothing special! Damn that computer was really fast! I topped it off with a Soundblaster AWE32 and MIDI music sounded amazing too with its software soundbanks.

Following this I went to Pentium 133 MHz, and it feels like the world of computing changed less and less following that. Things got more convenient as the x86 architecture won rather than having a smorgasbord of viable home computing options, but also a little bit more boring.

I’d say things got “boring” quite a while after the pentiums. All the peripherals like the cd burner got faster. Memory got larger and faster. Video got substantially faster. Network went from 10mbits to 1gb over time. Smarter power management started to exist. USB came online. Wi-Fi started to exist.

I’d say things got “boring” after the clock wars. Now says the clock is basically the same as it was 5 or even 10 years ago (though massively more parallel, etc). Average memory size seems to have peaked around 16gb (though substantially faster and more parallel). Average disk size has remained about the same (though way, way, way faster thanks to SSD’s).

Also things have gotten much smaller and more energy efficient. Back in the day your motherboard had all kinds of discrete shit on it. The board was huge in comparison to a modern board.

Note: it’s been a good 10 or 15 years since I’ve built a desktop PC from parts… I kinda miss it.

Boring maybe. But I'll take the sheer joy of plugging in a random USB device and having it just work over the absolutely pain it was dealing with serial and parallel ports and I/O addresses, DMA channels, IRQ conflicts, etc. And everything talks WiFi today. It's amazing. I have 64GB on my main machine. I can run (virtual) machines within machines! That's a goddamn miracle if you ask me. I bought some cheap HDMI capture stick for $10! I plug it in to USB and the thing just works. And in Linux. How?! I had Hauppauge WinTV PCI capture card in the late '90s and that thing barely worked (with their awful proprietary drivers and software) in Windows, never mind Linux support.

> The board was huge in comparison to a modern board.

The ATX form factor is still the most popular. Mini ITX is around today, but based on the fact that vendors only make a few models compared to their ATX selection tells me most builders still use ATX. I guess the AT form factor was larger, but ATX has been around since '95 or so.

Period-correct soundtrack to this comment in the form of someone's tracker file I've accidentally discovered some time ago:

http://modarchive.org/module.php?153383

    After a year or two, I overclocked it to 80 MHz 
    to run Duke Nukem 3D or Quake or whatever for a 
    _very precious_ +5 fps or so because your framerate 
    was often in the 20 fps range. Made a huge difference

Yeah! I think it's often lost to history how "vital" overclocking was. (Obviously, games aren't actually vital, but you know what I mean)

Overclocking was often the difference between "unplayable" and "playable." Or "playable" and "actually nice."

    Following this I went to Pentium 133 MHz, and it 
    feels like the world of computing changed less and less 
    following that.

For me there have only been two seismic hardware shifts since those days. One was LCD/LED screens. While I love CRTs for gaming, I do not miss staring at them all day for coding.

The other seismic shift for me was SSDs. After the 386/486/Pentium days the gap between CPU performance and HDD performance reached utterly absurd levels. You'd have these absolute beast CPUs just sitting around and waiting for ancient spinning rust. Ridiculous. SSDs rebalanced the equation a bit.

    Things got more convenient as the x86 architecture 
    won rather than having a smorgasbord of viable home 
    computing options, but also a little bit more boring.

Amen.

I got into PCs around same time as you, but imho the best overclock came years later: the Intel Celeron 300A would happily run at 450mhz for a whopping 50% increase.

I was right into FPS games at the time, and for a while it seemed every second person was running the overclocked 300A.

I recall Quake would timedemo at <1fps on a 486/80. DN3D was a much simpler, faster engine.

> It was amazing, and infuriating, to have your decently high-end system basically obsoleted in two generations. And, the DOS to Windows transition didn't help matters. It seems really odd in a time where you could still be using a 10 year old i7 and be just fine.

Indeed, and this went on for a good 10 years - possibly more - I think. I remember being annoyed that my decently high end system, purchased at the beginning of 2000, could no longer run many of the latest games (in some cases not even coming close to minimum specs) by early- to mid-2002.

I really stretched myself to buy that system in the first place and couldn't afford to replace it for years. I bought a new system in 2004 and then didn't buy another until 2011 when I moved to laptops and bought a 17" Macbook Pro (by which time it too felt very obsolete, whereas that 2011 MBP would still be fine if its GPU hadn't desoldered itself in 2017).

Nowadays I run a 7 year old MBP that's still more than capable of handling everything I need. Biggest issue is the battery life is really starting to suffer.

> Indeed, and this went on for a good 10 years - possibly more - I think. I remember being annoyed that my decently high end system, purchased at the beginning of 2000, could no longer run many of the latest games

I remember this period of very rapid advancement, too. It was such a trope in the computer market at the time, Weird Al even made fun of it in his lyrics:

My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks

But it was obsolete before I opened the box

You say you've had your desktop for over a week?

Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!

Your laptop is a month old? Well, that's great

If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight

(It's All About the Pentiums, 1999, "Running with Scissors")

I just gifted a 2013 MBP to my father after replacing the battery. It's a pain in the neck to replace, but fairly doable if you're even slightly inclined to hardware repair and can read instructions. Worst part was dissolving all the glue. Not sure why Apple felt the need to use seemingly aviation grade VHB tape to keep the batteries in, but it's a lot of acetone and a lot of scraping to get it all off. All it took was $90 for the kit and a couple hours.

I feel your pain. By 2005, my AMD Athlon XP with 256MB of RAM and GF2 was junk.

> Indeed, and this went on for a good 10 years - possibly more - I think.

Many more. An Apple II+ from 1979 was approaching obsolete in 1984. An IBM PC from 1985 was obsolete by 1990. A 386 machine from 1990 was obsolete by 1995. A Pentium machine from 1995 was obsolete in 2000. A Pentium III from 2000 was nearly obsolete in 2005. This cycle started in the late 70s, and I guess continued until computers were "fast enough" for all the typical software they might run. Video was the last big one. Even very cheap computers are now fast enough to render complex documents and display video, more or less instantly (at least with the right software). So, for most users they subjectively seem "fast enough".

Things do seem more stable these days, in terms of general compatibility. A Pentium III machine can still boot a current Linux distro, if rather slowly. And 20+ year old USB peripherals will still work on a modern machine. That's quite a change from the era when a new, incompatible architecture or peripheral bus came out every five years.

486DLC/SLC were not really "crippled versions", they were completely different CPU designs that used the 486 name as Intel wasn't able to stop other companies from using a number (one of the reasons for naming the next cpu family "pentium" which they could trademark/copyright). The crippled versions were the 486SXs, which disabled the FPU.

> The crippled versions were the 486SXs, which disabled the FPU.

Though for many use cases at the time, that wasn't a massive issue. Many games didn't take advantage of the FPU until far into the 486 era, they were only starting to when the Pentium and its competitors came out (a killer for Cyrix's P5-era chips which despite a very strong integer performance had terrible floating-point umph).

There were 487 FPU co-processors, to upgrade 486SXs, though unlike the 287 and 387 before them they weren't really co-processors, they were actually full 486 chips and the main CPU was disabled when they were present.

The name caused confusion because SX in 386 meant something completely different (there was no built-in FPU to disable): a 16-bit data bus instead of 32-bit and 24-bit address bus, along with more minor changes, so it would work on cheaper motherboards originally designed with 286's in mind.

The 486SLC kept the 16-bit bus, but I don't remember what it was about the DLC but it was much slower than an Intel 486 of the same clockspeed even thought it was a full 32-bit chip. I want to say it was something like it still used 386 motherboard designs (in both cases).

ISTR the SLC introduced SMM that allowed laptops to use the main CPU to do things that otherwise would've required an elaborate embedded controller.

And thus began the trend of having entire layers of functionality in the CPU that were outside the view of the OS which thought it was running at ring 0....

> There were 487 FPU co-processors

Curiously, those were actually the full 486DX CPUs that, when installed, would simply disable the old CPU and take over its function as well.

> It was amazing, and infuriating, to have your decently high-end system basically obsoleted in two generations.

I remember this all too well. And PCs were expensive. $2,000-3,000 rigs in 1990 money. Today you can pick up a loaded Ryzen laptop for less than half that in 2023 money. Crazy.

In the early '90s I was still on an IBM XT clone from around 1986 with CGA graphics and monitor. Few of the new games I wanted to play would work on it. It was worse when the 386 came out. Today, with a machine built around 2017 and a GTX 1080 I can still play most new games just fine.

I do kinda miss when AMD and Intel shared the CPU socket. I had a AMD 386dx40, which IIRC Intel never made a 386 that fast.

We can finally bought a (amd) 386 PC on... 1994, so go figure our luck trying playing the most recent games.

During that time the tech moved so fast it was worthless to try to upgrade existing hardware. By the time you wanted to upgrade almost everything had changed. New CPU socket, new memory, new/faster peripheral bus, etc.

About all you could keep between builds was the case, the monitor, the keyboard/mouse and maybe the power supply and soundcard.

It was almost always more cost effective to buy a new, much larger drive…

Mice also went from COM to PS/2 to USB, though ball mouse tended to break down earlier than it became obsolete.

DIN keyboards probably still work, though. No Win key.

Man ball mice sucked, it seemed like I was always cleaning the rollers. I generally am an early adopter of nothing but I rushed out to buy that first Microsoft Optical mouse. I was still using it on a secondary machine until a couple years ago when it finally died.

Don't forget the maths co-processor you could add as well...

> the 486's on steroids were for budget users

As far as i remember Pentium at 100 MHz was slower than a 486 DX/4 at 100 MHz

> As far as i remember Pentium at 100 MHz was slower than a 486 DX/4 at 100 MHz

No... the Pentium had advantages in both IPC (two pipes vs one) and bus speed (66MHz/64 bit vs at most 50MHz/32 bit).

I'd be interested to see a more info on this this, but I suspect you'd be hard pressed to write anything at all on the DX4 that ran faster than on the Pentium.

(The jump from Pentium to Pentium Pro would've been different, due to the way the Pentium Pro deliberately sacrificed 16-bit performance for gains on the 32-bit workloads Intel thought would dominate by then.)

I remember seeing one of the first Pentium's, it was either a 60 or 66mhz, but it was STUPIDLY fast. Way faster than any 486 we had at the time. We were just watching someone play Windows 3.11 solitaire on it and laughing when they won because the card "waterfall" animation took what felt like 1 second to complete. It was probably longer, maybe 3-4 seconds, but on our 486's it was probably 10-15 seconds.

Nope, the original Pentiums at 60/66 MHz were sometimes slower than 486 DX/4 at 100 MHz, but I don't remember the specifics. Pentium at 90 MHz was already faster at all times, the 100 MHz one had no competition from that DX/4.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com