New to the list

[Tony Duell]

> 
> >> I perfer to work with older systems (386s are fun!) [...]
> > I am curious as to what is 'fun' about 386s (I assume you mean PC
> > compatibles, and not, for example, Sequent multi-processor machines).
> 
> Well, I'm not the person you're responding to, but I have some
> possible suggestions.
> 
> > So the real low-level hardware/software hackability of these machines
> > would seem to be little different from a more modern PC.
> 
> I'm not so sure.
> 
> While I've never tried, I'd lay decent odds that it's a good deal
> easier to cobble together a working ISA board than a working PCI board.

I'd forgotten that. Yes, an ISA board can be built from junk-box parts in 
an hour or so. 

Another thing, it's a lot easier to interface to the parallel, serial or 
joystick ports than to Useless Serial Botch. I guess a 386 machine is 
very likely to have at least the first 2 of those, modern machines might 
well be USB only.

> Also, wasn't 386 instruction execution time predictible to the
> clock-cycle level (as opposed to more recent machines with caches and

I thought even the 8086 did some pre-fetching of instructions. Which 
means even that chip is less predicatable than, say, a Z80.

> And, of course, it's entirely possible that 16-year-old happens to be
> emotionally attached to 386s for reasons completely unrelated to their
> technical merits or lack thereof - perhaps there's some cherished game

Sure. That's why I'm curious about why he's interested in such machines.

-tony