I remember my PC with an Intel 80386 processor. It ran Windows 2.0. Did you have one?
I bought my first computer in 1997 or so. All I remember about it was that is was a Compaq? I think HP later bought them out.
The first version of the 80386 had 275,000 transistors, which was considered high end at the time. Your Compaq was much more powerful than the 80386!
I'm not very technical. What exactly are transistors? lol
Transistors are semiconductor devices used to switch electronic signals. They are the "brain" of the computer.
Cool! It sounds like you are a tech expert.
Vacuum tube
In electronics, a vacuum tube, an electron tube, or valve (British usage) or, colloquially, a tube (North America), is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric potential difference has been applied.
The type known as a thermionic tube or thermionic valve uses the phenomenon of thermionic emission of electrons from a heated cathode and is used for a number of fundamental electronic functions such as signal amplification and current rectification.
Non-thermionic
long. The hardware used the Non Maskable Interrupt (NMI) to take control back to the emulation code. More detail may be seen in the patent referenced in the External Links below.
Later Merge was enhanced to make use of the virtual 8086 mode provided by the Intel 80386 processor; that version was offered with Microport SVR3 starting in 1987, and subsequently with SCO Unix. There was also a Merge/286 version that ran on an unmodified PC/AT (without any special I/O trapping hardware); it ran