Anyone Remember The "Old 486DX"?

[Ewu]

Haha... I was still using my seven year old 486 DX-33 with 8 megs of 30 pins simms, VESA Local Bus Controller and Video Card until last summer. For a long time it was running classic Win 3.1/Dos 6.2, until I finally decided to put Win'95 on it last summer. It ran like a dog, but not as bad as Win'98. Haha... took me hours for it to install only to get rid of it after less than an hour. After that, I finally decided it was time to build a new computer. Weirdly enough everything still works on it, and nothing has failed on it yet. Though I can tell the battery on the motherboard slightly dying a slow death since the time is never correct.

 

[snow patrol]

Ah yes, I too was the owner of a 486 DX2 66Mhz piece - it was in fact the first PC I built myself. Fully equipped with 2X cd rom, isa sound card and graphics and not forgetting the mighty windows 3.11 Although I think I upgraded to Windows 95 on that machine at some stage...ar the fond, fond memories!

 

[joeyd]

i was like 12 or something .... mabye younger i dunno ... to many beers ago and my dad brought home a 386 sx 16mhz.... he messed it up 2 hours later and gave it to me... i fixed it and i still have it at my uncles house to play my old games on... then i got a p100 then a p2 300 , a athlon 700 , a duron 650

 

Still got a few 386sx25's around.
And that wonderful AMD 5x85-133 @ 160. =D
GO 486 power.
..
When I worked for the us govt. at brookhaven natl labs.
They gave me a pent 60 with a 500 meg SCSI HDD to code CAD based applications in MDL.
FUN
!

 

[vivek]

Hmmm.... memories !!!

Well, I remember my first encounter with a PC (yes..not even an XT) around 1989. It had two floppy drives and no hard disk ! i used to carry a 5 1/4' floppy with DOS on it. You could'nt work without this floppy. All the other stuff used to be stored in another floppy. Well, we had to pop both of them in the two drives and then use software such as WordStar, Lotus. Ofcourse, there was this monitor with the green character display to accompany the PC. A fitting companion .

Hmm... then there was this PC-XT (reaaaally eXtented Technology ) that used to run at an incredible 13Mhz and a huge memory of 640 KB with an incredible 20 MB HDD. Do you guys remember all the whirrrrrling sounds that the hdd used to make and the peculiar beep when the post was being performed ? Strangely the accompanying monitor was an orange character (not green !) based.

Then there was this really fast PC-AT 386 at 25 MHZ with an astounding 40 MB HDD, a VGA (yes a monochrome VGA) monitor and ofcourse (640+384) KB of RAM. I used to do some Pascal programming at that time and used to think that "(640+384) KB RAM and 40 MB HDD ought to be enough for anyone" ;-)
Then, it happened. My friend bought a AMD 486 DX2 @ 66 Mhz with an mind blowing 320 MB HDD. Boy, were all of us excited to see that !!! My friends still uses it !

 

[ThurzNite]

vivek: do you have the year correct? We bought our packard bell 286 12mhz (ran at 16mhz...no oc...weird) in 1987 for $2500. It had 40mb hd (stac'd to 100!) 4mb ram ($200) onboard vga 640x480x256 (svga w/special packard bell monitor), high density 3.5 and 5.25, 2/1/1 (if you know what that means...you're old school!). A friend gave me his creative sound blaster 2.0, which worked ok for 8bit. Mouse/mouse card. 2port game card. Modems ranging from 128 to 56k (had 300 most of the time). Had some kinda ethernet card, but never linked to a network. Bios battery never ran out. I had this computer until 1998. That's when my bro scrapped together a cyrix 120 for me.
Jay

 

[Petro89]

486s RULE!
I still have an old P Bell Legend (originally DX2-50 and 4MB ram). It now boasts an AMD 5X86-133 and 36 MB, good enough for win 95, word, email, etc. I can't count the hours I've used that machine over the last 6 or 7 years. Very, very dependable.
I used to play Duke 3d over the network in our dorm. I had to use a program called univbe or something to get it to run the video smoothly, but it eventually did.
I remember when I got the computer (Feb 1994), all my friends were $hittin' their pants since it was a 50 Mhz. Man, it would run Doom like a dream!
All that for only $2100! What a deal!

 

[SuperGroove]

I have a 486DX/2 50MHZ Compaq Presario...lemme tell ya...it's the cleanest computer I own. I barely ever used it...couldn't run anything but Doom.

Paul

 

[wsmith5]

ah those were the days I paid $400 for the dx266 and $500 for an AMI motherboard ,currently runs with intel p83 overdrive whoo hoo......