"Seriously - those first 386 chips barely worked at all. " Anyone remember?

Re:"Seriously - those first 386 chips barely worked at all. ... by ctdonath on Monday February 07, 2011 @09:19AM (#2188956)

In fairness, the 386 was the first large-volume processor with real memory management, threading, virtual machine, etc support, to wit the first real processor as we know it now. The 286 was stunted, requiring a covert reboot to switch processes. 486 and beyond were incremental improvements in speed and convenience, not fundamental capability.

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Re:"Seriously - those first 386 chips barely worked at all. ... by tptacek on Monday February 07, 2011 @09:48AM (#2189052)

The 386 was not the first processor with a modern MMU; you have to go back to the '70s for that. The 80286 could thread. The 386 didn't have virtual machine support (you may again be referring to the MMU). And the first generation Core processor is a drastically different machine in almost every respect from the 386.

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Re:"Seriously - those first 386 chips barely worked at all. ... by yuhong on Tuesday February 08, 2011 @12:51AM (#2192126)

To be more precise, the 80286 introduced the protected mode with support for using segmentation for memory management. The 386 added paging and extended the architecture to 32-bit, and added Virtual 8086 mode.

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Re:"Seriously - those first 386 chips barely worked at all. ... by glhaynes on Monday February 07, 2011 @11:09AM (#2189427)

The 386 didn't have virtual machine support (you may again be referring to the MMU).

ctdonath might be referring to Virtual 8086 mode that let multiple real mode programs run in isolated virtual machines.

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Re:"Seriously - those first 386 chips barely worked at all. ... by JoeAltmaier on Monday February 07, 2011 @10:01AM (#2189096)

It took so long for the 386 'protected mode' to work well that we had one engineer that called them "real mode' and 'imaginary mode'.

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