What the EEVBlog forum looks like to a 486

[kultakala]

Then again, my 120mhz DX4 is likely faster than your 1992-era 486.

Yours is probably way faster...  the original cpu is a 20 MHz 386 processor without any cache.
The upgrade processor need to fit into the same socket so it just has an internal 486 core running at 40 Mhz, but is still a 386 to the outside.
And the (1 MB ?) cache is not usable because this needs some modifications to the motherboard which i did not do yet

And i have only 6 MB RAM in the laptop...  but its a cool device!

[Ampera]

Holy crap, 1MB of cache? I own Pentium 3s that have less than that. Most 386's (and very early 486's) had normally anywhere from 16 to 128k of L2 cache on board, with lower end 386's not being too far from having 1MB of total system memory.

Plasma displays have always been something strange to me. I've never seen one, but it just looks like it would hurt my eyes like nothing else. The high colours and low contrast to me just seem like something that would drain my physically and mentally from a day of using it.

[james_s]

A photo doesn't really do justice to the plasma display. I have a Compaq Portable III and the plasma panel produces a really nice clear picture which is more of a soft yellowish orange than the deep reddish color it appears in photos. It's actually quite pleasant, much better than the passive matrix LCDs of the era.

[Ampera]

Smashing your face in with a metal baseball bat is preferable to passive matrix LCDs.

[james_s]

Well it's what was available at the time. Modern TFTs had not been invented yet, and the first time I saw a 386sx laptop with a passive matrix monochrome display I thought it was so amazing that a whole computer could fit into something I could hold in my hands. The plasma screens were very expensive and only came on high end machines. The first active matrix color LCDs cost even more, a laptop with one of those was around $4,000 more than one with a passive mono display. On top of that, the color displays were smaller and almost always had at least one dead pixel. The vast majority of laptops on the market had passive matrix displays, even up into the early 2000's.

[Bud]

The plasma screen was soft on the eyes, much better than any of todays LCD.