My first computer was based on the Intel 80386 microprocessor. Are you familiar with it?
No I am not, was it used in one of the first PCs released by IBM back in 1981?
I believe it was and a lot of other companies tried to emulate those IBMs, which were created with that processor. How fast were those processors, any idea?
The Intel 80386 was introduced in 1085 and it was 32-bit so in comparison to today's standards probably really slow but a massive evolution back in the day!
Interesting. So a floating point number would be limited by today's standards. I wonder how overcoming that 32-bit limitation, helped with scientific simulations and experiments.
context.
The 32-bit 80386 can correctly execute most code intended for the earlier 16-bit processors such as 8086 and 80286 that were ubiquitous in early PCs. (Following the same tradition, modern 64-bit x86 processors are able to run most programs written for older x86 CPUs, all the way back to the original 16-bit 8086 of 1978.) Over the years, successively newer implementations of the same architecture have become several hundreds of times faster than the original 80386 (and thousands of times faster than the 8086). A 33
embarked on a major marketing and sales campaign for that chip nicknamed "Operation Crush", and intended to win as many customers for the processor as possible. One design win was the newly created IBM PC division, though the importance of this was not fully realized at the time.
IBM introduced its personal computer in 1981, and it was rapidly successful. In 1982, Intel created the 80286 microprocessor, which, two years later, was used in the IBM PC/AT. Compaq, the first IBM PC "