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My first computer/parents was a 386SX and a 20mb hard disk (almost all of my peers started w/ the Apple IIs, so I was late to this game). I begged by dad over and over to buy a 386DX, not a SX, but no luck on that.

There was something weird where windows wouldn't run in 386 protected mode. I was sure it was DX and SX, but this article has the assertion that protected mode worked with SX. I know my dad replaced the system, I assumed he updated the CPU, but maybe it was a bad mobo or something.

DIY computing to me will always be RLL/MFM hard disks with insane ribbon cables and IRQ toggles on ISA slots.

God, I am old.



Old enough to remember Plug-N-Play ISA cards? More like Plug-N-Pray... har har.

It was also a bit of an art back then to stuff as much of the needed TSRs and device drivers into the memory above 640K, to leave as much room as possible for applications.


Tweaking EMM386.exe and your config.sys and autoexec.bat..


I kinda liked using 4dos and norton utilities to make menu trees to set specific parameters in config.sys and autoexec.bat based on what you were going to use the PC for that boot cycle.


And comparing that with QEMM and 386 to the Max! And using some bootmanager to even switch between DOS/DR-DOS and PTS-DOS!


Yes. I remember being confused more than once about extended memory vs. expanded memory.

These days I'm dealing with an SoC company that has a dozen variants of the same processor, which have different combinations of four letters in the suffix in various combinations.


I used to do telephone support for Lotus 1-2-3 in that era. I've completely lost track of modern CPU naming conventions.


Do you remember the graphical meters in Wolfenstein 3D which showed lower memory, EMS, and XMS before the game ran?


Never saw those! My favourite mememory from that that game is when you open that door to the first bossfight, behind it waiting is huge guy with gatling guns instead of arms saying: "Guten Tag" befoee he start shooting.


It was right as you started the game -- it looked like this: https://i.imgur.com/yjWksNt.png




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