Author Topic: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?  (Read 4119 times)

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Offline DiTBhoTopic starter

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nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« on: March 31, 2022, 10:05:07 am »
My first computer was a Sharp MZ-80 *wheelbarrow computer* with a LH-0080  Z80 compatible CPU under a heavy plastic shell fuse with a bad keyboard, no floppy drive, but a tape driver in case you want to load a Pascal compiler. Otherwise you might just enjoy GW-BASIC

yes, GW-BASIC ... the BASIC with lines, no text-editor, only suffering and panic among a thousand thousand "GOTO LINEX" and "GOSUB LINXY".

"TRON" was the only debugger for that kind of crazy thing, but - worse still - it was not an option on my *wheelbarrow computer* :'(

Having been pureed in the hydraulic press many years ago like a puree the potatoes through the sieve, the Sharp MZ-80 is something I'll definitely never want to type anything into, so the likelihood of buying it again on eBay due to some sort of nostalgia is equal to the likelihood that humans will never understand why some sub-particles can be written without the time variable in their equations(1).

Nobody knows what is *nostalgia*, kind of illusionistic sentimental longing based on a wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with distorted happy personal associations, or if *time* itself is an illusion, kind of our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to a physical reality onto which we project sequences of past, present and future.

Anyway, my perception of time is that my second computer was an i386 personal computers with a better keyboard, two floppy drivers (one for 3.5" one for 5.25"), no colors but a VGA screen, and a OS able to run TurboAssembler, TurboPascal and TurboC with a text editor!

From this point of view: we made progress! even if, when I looked at the assembly level ...  I found the i386-architecture, x86, or IA-32, depending on context, pretty terrible and too confusing, anyway at least I learned new programming languages.

Again my perception of past events, again pureed in the hydraulic press with some sadistic pleasure, because I then switched to a UNIX-RISC-workstation, which I simply love from the ISA up.

Really for me, RISC was the turning point for everything, and having grown up with 386-level systems during the early 90s like so many of us, I never experienced an intense longing to experience the those i386 computer systems by building your own 80386DX-based single board computer.

And why should I? To run ... what? ... DOS?
What is this new hype on Hackaday?!?

Does it serve to prove some physical theory?  :o :o :o

Like positing that reality is just a complex network of events onto which we project sequences of past, present and future (experience with computers), and the whole Universe obeys the laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, out of which time emerges?




(1) Rovelli puts forward the idea of ‘physics without time’.
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Offline Berni

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #1 on: March 31, 2022, 10:42:28 am »
Nostalgia doesn't have to make sense. It's just whatever you have fond memories of (while often forgetting about how bad something actually was back then).

There is no denying that the 386 PC was a very successful platform, so a lot of people have used one back in the day. The successors of the same architecture are still absolutely dominating the market today.

If you wanted to experience old software and games you can more easily run it emulated inside doxbox, but this doesn't feel as authentic. The mucking about with motherboard jumpers and IRQs to get the hardware to cooperate, the whirring and clunking of a old 300MB hard drive, the buzzing of a painfully slow floppy drive, the disk swaps during installation, the fuzzy scan lines of a CRT etc.. is all part of the experience. This is what gets your brain to recall all the memories of the 'good ol times' as nostalgia.

Nostalgia about the GameBoy is a similar thing. Looking back at it the thing was pretty terrible with that crappy low contrast 4 level grayscale LCD that has a pixel response time of a dead horse. It already used dated hardware at the time, then the GameBoy Color reused the dated hardware again. All the competitors had better specs. But the GameBoy was cheep and achieved by far the best market penetration, so a lot of people had one. Hence lots of people are nostalgic about it.

Similar for Vinyl. Performance wise it is worse compared too our modern lossless digital music formats and more awkward and expensive too. But it has a tactile physical aspect to it that taping a flac file on a screen does not have.

I am personally not into retro computing, retro gaming or vinyl but i can see why some people are.
 
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Offline DiTBhoTopic starter

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #2 on: March 31, 2022, 11:15:53 am »
my understanding of time-space is that to move forward you have to leave something behind.

I still play with GBA (Game Boy Advance), I mean I sometimes program some cartridges, but only because it offers a simpler ARM chip than today's Cortex. It makes sense for a practical purpose (less pages to study on the datasheet and manual -> better for hobby) rather than nostalgia for your days in college.

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Offline DiTBhoTopic starter

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #3 on: March 31, 2022, 07:19:12 pm »
"building your own 80386dx isa single board microcomputer", this is the link to the article on Hackaday  :o :o :o

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Offline TimFox

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #4 on: March 31, 2022, 07:22:37 pm »
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
 
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Offline Coordonnée_chromatique

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #5 on: March 31, 2022, 08:14:11 pm »
The 386SX was too slow for DOOM, but the DX was just powerfull enough for a 320x240 screen resolution.
 
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Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #6 on: March 31, 2022, 08:14:52 pm »
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

 ;D
 
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Offline DiTBhoTopic starter

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #7 on: March 31, 2022, 09:12:53 pm »
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

even Physics isn't what it used to be  :D

Many people assume that they perceive the world as it actually is as if eyes and ears were windows that allow us to access an objective reality, but nowadays we know reality is an illusion and it's why the new physics needs neurosciences; why? well  ... perception is not an accurate reflection of an externally existing world, and even the intuitive "Newton's universal clock" is just a matter of how a brain perceives reality.

Which brings to new questions ... how does our brain perceive reality? How does the brain create our perception of reality? Why do our brains need time to process reality? And what part of the brain controls perception of reality? What does turn the raw material of sensory data into our projected perceptual reality? And is there any hidden quantum process involved?

Too many questions, we still don't know, but with human beings there are parts of the brain that need to elaborate feelings like nostalgia in memory, memory implies entropy, and entropy is rather a good thing, because without entropy there is no time-flow, and without time flow learning is impossible.

So nostalgia, in terms of "memory of the past reflecting achieved progress", whatever it is, it's a great thing.
« Last Edit: March 31, 2022, 09:23:44 pm by DiTBho »
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Offline DiTBhoTopic starter

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #8 on: March 31, 2022, 09:15:13 pm »
The 386SX was too slow for DOOM, but the DX was just powerfull enough for a 320x240 screen resolution.

AMD386DX ruled
(Xmas upgrade)
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Offline jmelson

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #9 on: April 01, 2022, 12:48:28 am »
Several months ago we got a piece of (very expensive) gear from another department.  It was an X-ray fluorescence analyzer.  The computer it came with was decrepit and I was not able to get it to run reliably, then it refused to show any display at all.  After vast amounts of mucking around with trying to build a suitable virtual machine to run it, I dragged in my old deskop from home that had the needed ISA slots, and it booted up with the old hard drive with all the software for the XRF machine.  We then ordered a legacy-compatible ISA slot machine, and tried to clone the hard drive.  Just couldn't get that to work, so finally built a new DOS 7.1 system and copied all the files over.  After some crazy problems with getting ANSI.SYS to work and interpret the graphics commands, it all works!
And just in time, too, as the original hard drive went belly up.
So, DOS 7.1, EMM386, HIMEM, CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT --  Oh the (bad) memories!

Jon
 
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Offline DiTBhoTopic starter

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #10 on: April 01, 2022, 09:48:26 am »
Yup, for me it means 1992-1997  :D

I am working on a special form of DosBOX that is able to embed a { .exe, .com } dos executable like if was a true Linux program. But it's not like Wine, no doubt it's simpler, but it also captures all the function calls to display something and readdress the text to the console.

The CONIO support is partially working, and buggy, this stuff has been designed to embed DOS compilers, it doesn't work with anything with a GUI.

Anyway, it just works, and I don't need anything else from my DOS-era.
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Online rstofer

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #11 on: April 01, 2022, 05:24:24 pm »
Remember, the first PC incantation of Unix was 386BSD and many flavors of PC Unix started with this version.  Note the '386'...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD

In the days of the command line where no GUI was available, the 386 was adequate.  I would go for the 100 MHz 486 but that's just an incremental change.  Command line rules!

A 386 was adequate for UCSD Pascal and certainly for MS-DOS.  These machines were quite fast because there was little overhead.

I have a 50 MHz eZ80 board running CP/M 2.0.  It rips!

It's just that our expectations have changed over the last 30 years.  I started programming on punch cards.  I'm not sure whether I miss it or not!

 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #12 on: April 01, 2022, 06:01:57 pm »
Designing "vintage" stuff is a hobby as any other. Why would it make no sense to design a 386-based board when many still design 6502-based ones @1 MHz? A 386 is much, much more powerful while still being relatively "easy" to integrate, I guess that's the whole point. Try designing your own small CPU board with even a Pentium, and tell us how far you go.

It can be out of nostalgia, but also for the learning factor. You'll learn a whole lot designing and programming your own system like this. That's something that has become basically impossible with more modern tech - with which you'll be basically stuck with using something off-the-shelf, or emulating something on a purely virtual basis. So even for a young EE that would never have even used a 386-based PC, designing such a board would be a good exercise.

If you want to get your hands dirty, this kind of CPUs still make sense.
Alternatively, you can still see some people designing 68030-based boards. For those who like the 68k better. Manageable as a single-person design, yet can run a whole range of existing software.
 

Online rstofer

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #13 on: April 01, 2022, 06:16:55 pm »
Some of us are still messing around with Z80 (and CP/M) systems:

https://rc2014.co.uk/

Don't forget, CP/M had a PL/I compiler.  It works well on my 50 MHz eZ80.  Microsoft had a nice implementation of Fortran (and assembly) along with a nice linker.

There was also a more powerful shell, MicroShell, that added many Unix like features.

The easiest chip to use was the 8085.  I did several projects with that chip.  Palo Alto Tiny Basic was usually used for hardware debugging.  If Basic ran, the system was useful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC

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Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #14 on: April 01, 2022, 06:31:11 pm »
I have the CP/M source code, and it was a mix of assembly and PL/M.

Just a small utility routine:
Code: [Select]
move: procedure(s,d,n);
    declare (s,d) address, n byte;
    declare a based s byte, b based d byte;
        do while (n := n - 1) <> 255;
        b = a; s = s + 1; d = d + 1;
        end;
    end move;
 

Online rstofer

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #15 on: April 01, 2022, 11:55:23 pm »
I've got the Fortran source for PL/M.  I've written a lot of Fortran but not like that!
Gary Kildall was a genius!

I have the rest of the CP/M source as well but I always wanted PL/M.  Instead I got PL/I which is pretty nice.
 

Offline DiTBhoTopic starter

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #16 on: April 02, 2022, 10:45:37 am »
Designing "vintage" stuff is a hobby as any other. Why would it make no sense to design a 386-based board when many still design 6502-based ones @1 MHz?

6502 is of two order of magnitude simpler, and beauty to be programmed in assembly.
i386 is complex, its ISA is not elegant, and on the top of this, DOS is full of crappy BIOS function calls.

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Offline DiTBhoTopic starter

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #17 on: April 02, 2022, 11:03:14 am »
Remember, the first PC incantation of Unix was 386BSD and many flavors of PC Unix started with this version.  Note the '386'...

I am with Linux since v1.*, I still have here Caldera, Corel (crazy, but it existed), Suse, Debian, Slackware, ... and other fancy CDs and DVDs.

Times when internet worked with phone-coupled modem, you weren't able to "download" anything big (2x600MByte through a 4800bps phone-modem?!?) because it was too expensive, and you went to the newsstand to buy magazines with included CDs of Linux.

Those CDs were mostly i386-binaries, sometimes with the sources, usually you had to pay extra money to the young man at the newsstand for the CD-bonus.

The first time I compiled the entire Linux kernel and entire GNU user space from scratch was for a hacked MIPS-R3K router to function as a server (kernel 2.2.* gcc v2.*)

Since then, I abandoned x86 as much as I could  :D
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Offline DiTBhoTopic starter

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #18 on: April 02, 2022, 11:12:27 am »
best toys!

if you have to choose between a ti84(1) and a ti89(2), which one would you choose  :D?

(1) z80-based graphing programmable calculator, programmable in basic, C, assembly
(2) 68k-based graphing programmable calculator, programmable in basic, C, assembly
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Online rstofer

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #19 on: April 02, 2022, 03:42:03 pm »
Designing "vintage" stuff is a hobby as any other. Why would it make no sense to design a 386-based board when many still design 6502-based ones @1 MHz?

6502 is of two order of magnitude simpler, and beauty to be programmed in assembly.
i386 is complex, its ISA is not elegant, and on the top of this, DOS is full of crappy BIOS function calls.

That's because MS-DOS is a direct ripoff from CP/M and CP/M wanted to be able to abstract the hardware at the BIOS level.  In the early years I wrote a ton of BIOS code for different platforms with different hardware features but I never had to worry about the non-BIOS code and whether it would work.

I also did some work with 6502 adding hard drives to Apple IIs.  The 6502 was simple but perhaps too simple.  I thought it was harder to program than the 8080s but that may be because I didn't have as much experience with the chip and I certainly didn't have as many tools.

There are FPGA versions of the 6502 over at Opencores.
 

Online rstofer

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #20 on: April 02, 2022, 04:01:16 pm »
best toys!

if you have to choose between a ti84(1) and a ti89(2), which one would you choose  :D?

(1) z80-based graphing programmable calculator, programmable in basic, C, assembly
(2) 68k-based graphing programmable calculator, programmable in basic, C, assembly

Over the last few years, I have been paying attention to the calculators recommended in college textbooks and it looks like the TI-84 owns that market.  I think it trickles down to the high school level as well.  Where calculator examples are given, it seems that they are written for the TI-84.

So, I would go with the flow and at least own a TI-84 (which I do) although I own a lot of high end calculators.  My favorite for computing is the HP 48GX (the buttons are in the 'right' place) but the screen is too dim for my now aging eyes so I use an HP Primer Graphing Calculator for a lot of my work.  I do have HP48GXs on both of my desks.

The HP Prime has a lot more features than the 48GX but I wrote an entire celestial navigation program for the 48GX.  I liked programming in RPL.

I like the lighted display of the HP Prime so even though it is neither a TI-84 nor a TI-89, I still recommend it.  But there is every good reason to follow along with the textbooks.

There is also the issue of CAS - Computer Algebra System - and whether a calculator with such a feature can be used for standardized exams like the SAT.  Some calculators have a button sequence that the proctor can push to disable the feature for the duration of the exam, others are just prohibited.  The TI Nspire is in this group, CAS can be disabled, it isn't trivial.  The TI-84 does not have CAS, the HP Prime does and it is easy to disable CAS for a defined period of time.  The HP48GX does not have CAS.

There is the secondary consideration that the SAT and similar standardized exams may be going out the window.


« Last Edit: April 02, 2022, 04:10:02 pm by rstofer »
 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #21 on: April 02, 2022, 05:14:41 pm »
Designing "vintage" stuff is a hobby as any other. Why would it make no sense to design a 386-based board when many still design 6502-based ones @1 MHz?

6502 is of two order of magnitude simpler, and beauty to be programmed in assembly.
i386 is complex, its ISA is not elegant, and on the top of this, DOS is full of crappy BIOS function calls.

That's your view.
It's not that complex, and can do a lot of useful stuff.
 

Offline DiTBhoTopic starter

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #22 on: April 02, 2022, 06:41:50 pm »
8080 and z80 are simple for me, 80286, 80386 and above are too complex for me.

I seriously started programming in assembly with m68k and MIPS-R3K, not with x86, and still today when I have to work with the x86-softcpu incorporated in my dosemu-hack I have to work much harder because there are too many things to care about with x86.

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Offline DiTBhoTopic starter

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #23 on: April 02, 2022, 06:58:33 pm »
@rstofer
I would buy the calculator * only * to program it in assembly :D

There is a nice project for TI84: a full OS written in z80 assembly, somehow able to replace the original firmware, but, between z80 and m68k, I would prefer the latter.

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Offline aneevuser

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Re: nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
« Reply #24 on: April 03, 2022, 01:19:06 pm »
I suspect that one reason for significant i386 nostalgia is the fact that it was the first Intel device to support paged virtual memory, which I guess lead directly to the development of Linux, and sad, nerdy people subsequently spending hours downloading SLS ...
 
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