Stephen Kitt covers the bases well, but I think the majority of the reason relates to fact that Windows 3.0 finally brought 286 protected mode execution to the masses. Even though the 80286 was first ...
Not all of the original co-processors were for floating point math. Intel itself offered an I/O coprocessor for the 8088 and 8086 called the 8089. Part of the reason it didn't do as well as the 8087 ...
The Turbo button originally adjusted the clock speed of the computer between the full speed of the machine and a slower speed intended to be compatible with something more industry standard. It wasn't ...
What it boils down to is that, unlike in a flat addressing model, there are multiple types of pointers: near - 16-bit (16-bit offset only.) far - 32-bit (16-bit offset + 16-bit segment) huge - The ...
In the early 1990's CDC sold a line of Cyber 180 mainframes. These machines were descendants of the CDC 6600 and supported that machine's 60-bit word size and 6-bit characters. Notably, one of the ...
In the personal/home computer space, the usual model was that the machine shipped with built in BASIC and the ability to save and load data from an attached cassette tape. This includes the original ...
Early in the history of computing, it wasn't uncommon to have machines that were physically designed to operate in base-10. (Even if signalling was internally on/off.) Designers of the time understood ...
VLB was a stopgap solution to fix ISA. The 16-bit ISA bus originated in the original PC AT (1984) and was showing its age by the time of the 486. Not only was it 16-bits, system designers had long ...
IBM's original virtual memory machine was the System/360 Model 67, released in 1965, which was a variant of the Model 65 modified to add the address translation logic necessary to add virtual memory ...
This was in no way part of a hardware assisted 3D pipeline, but there were attempts made in PC-class hardware to achieve anti-aliasing even as early as 1990. Edsun Labs made a drop in replacement ...
Which makes it surprising that the IBM portable PC flopped; it looks to me like essentially the same product, only with the IBM nameplate; I would expect this to be an attractive proposition for the ...
Damaging the computer itself is hard to imagine, but damaging peripherals is much easier. Back in the early days of Linux (94-95), configuring the X11 server (that put graphics on the screen) required ...
The big value-add feature advertised for the Hercules Graphics Card Plus was RamFont, or re-definable character sets. Custom characters could be uploaded into the card, and rendered as part of a 3072 ...
So in the 286 era, you didn't need to put memory cards on the system bus anymore. There were a number of driving factors that decoupled memory expansion from the ISA expansion bus, but early 286 ...
I remember running a version of DOS 4.0 on my 1989-era 386sx machine, along with DesqView/386. Shortly thereafter, we installed Windows 3.0 and then MS DOS 5.0... As far as being period correct and ...
I don't know how 'early' this is, but in 1990, the HP48 series had built in RS232. In addition to the IR used by the immediately preceding HP28, there was also a four pin serial connector on the ...
There were a couple basic strategies I remember employing for migrating data from one PC to another. The simplest of these was just moving disks from one PC to another. For small volumes of data, this ...