Carcenomy wrote:Wow... ten years ago I never thought I'd hear someone use the term 'desirable' and '386SX' in one sentence... how times change! I always thought people desired 386DXs anyway
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
Even ten years ago, a 386 of any class was considered a vintage box! (The pentium had arrived in '93) If I had known they would have vanished so quickly from the scene I would still have admitted, however foolish it sounded, that I would give house space to an SX!
Back in the day, I had a Compaq 386sx system. It was truly horrible, in only the way Compaq could have managed. Proprietary memory, diabolic layout, 'disc spaces' needed Compaq branded drive slides to fit anything - see my current Compaq Prosignia 300 system as another example! Poor BIOS (which was barely configurable with the Compaq diagnostics) and none of the user selectable drive shapes forcing you to use really ugly old small hard drives - (System had an IDE HDD cotroller built in, no MFM, but yeah, finding an IDE drive that matched one of the old MFM CHS patterns was so much fun, 33MB of a 40MB HDD. money well spent). So if anybody was going to say I'd like another 386sx I might have hit them. Eventually, I got a wonderful no-name motherboard. Used standard SIMMs, no controller on board, and I think it may have had the exemplary Award BIOS. It was only 25MHz, and I quickly sold it as a 386 had become just a toy - clock doubled and tripled 486 or pentium for everybody!
I'd have to go and read details about the SX version of the 386, but off the top of my head it was mainly crippled in the memory controller, max 16MB addressable, and all done with 16bit transfers, so that explains why they were frowned on, but for a home computer (Windows 3 just on the scene, 4MB being considered huge in a home computer) it was plenty if you didn't go in for many shoot-em-up games. The DX had huge memory addressing space, though limited by the motherboard manufacturers and SIMM sizes available at the time, and 32bit transfers. Woo-hoo, I'm dizzy just thinking about it.
Not so bad off as the 486sx, that was a chip worthy of your derision. I used a 'server' with a 25MHz 486sx. Even 32MB of RAM, two cached controller cards and a network card with it's own 20MHz AMD CPU and 1MB RAM couldn't help that cripple. The less said about that, the better.
The PC Direct 386 system would have been about as middle of the road as a representative of the home PC in the early 90s could get. A real good example being a 'Kiwi' machine too!
(Man alive do I ramble. I better go have a lie down, and I apologize for wasting your evening again)