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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

The 80386 DX was a revolutionary CPU. It certainly foreshadowed the 486 and ultimately the Pentium. Most people I know only had a 80386 SX which was still revolutionary but it hid it well by being essentially a glorified (but slower) 80286 on the outside.

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The SX may have been slower, but it could still run all 386 software which was a huge advantage over the 286. I had a 16MHz 286 and I so badly wanted a 386SX 16Mhz so I could run 32-bit software.

Superseding a ZX-Spectrum, luckily my first PC was a Siemens-Nixdorf 386-SX @ 16 Mhz, no FPU, with 2 Mb of RAM and a 40 Mb hard drive: https://www.ebay.com/itm/172038842293

I did install Windows on it briefly from what I recall but wasn't impressed, there wasn't much to do with it. Games would be pure DOS and for programming I'd use Borland Pascal so again DOS.

But as a gaming machine it ran anything I could throw at it at the time, which was 286-games actually. Without realizing I had the absolute best "286" machine I could have, for DOS gaming it is apparently much better to play them on a 386: (Why you don't want a vintage 286 PC -- but I like mine anyway): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Htbvm5_NZHc

The 386SX could do everything the 386DX did, just slower. My first Linux box was a 386SX machine. Before Linux, I ran Coherent on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

I paid $99 for Coherent because Linux didn't support the fancy RLL hard drive in my work computer. Eventually Linux caught up (or I got a new computer) and Slackware replaced Coherent (for little things like X11, better networking etc.). Those were the days :)

Another Coherent fan here. That was an awesome system. And for once: awesome documentation. The Coherent book long outlived the Coherent system for me.

I totally agree! I still remember the cover of that book, with the picture of the shell on it. I learned most of the "POSIX" APIs from it before I moved to Linux.

I still have all my Coherent manuals and disks. I still referenced the manual for years after I moved on to Linux.

Coherent sounds really cool, I've never heard of it before. I wish I had known about it back in the day.

I had a 386DX, 25 MHz with 4MB and ran Slackware 3.0 with kernel 1.2.13 on it. It worked pretty nicely for me, but I have to say that I spent most of my time on the console. X11 did run but it was too slow to be fun.

Coherent was quite impressive for the early 90's! It had some limitations though, the major one being no networking built in. I remember using a 3rd party app (KA9Q, I think?) to give me "user level" networking so I could connect to another system over SLIP. I had an early home network built out of serial cables.

Once Linux stabilized, the writing was on the wall...

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