[cctalk] 80386 - 1985

40 years ago this year Intel came out with the 80386 – 386 – or i386. Either seems to be correct. What this meant was a memory address of 4GB, far beyond what an average computer user would need or want, but was so much more than previously(8086, 80286); ‘true’ multi-tasking which for the average computer user didn’t mean all that much; and paging, which made virtualization possible- experimenters were over-joyed! What all this contributed to was the end of the classical/vintage-computing era. Whether this began the time of open-source OS development is debatable! Happy computing? Murray 🙂