On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 11:04:34PM -0400, Nick Holland wrote: > > HOWEVER, the 80386sx was a non-starter for a long time: these machines > only had 24 bit address buses, so it had a max of 16M, and being they > were "cheap" machines, the actual potential of most of the hardware > they were used in was 12M, 8M, or way, way less. I don't know that > I have ever seen an 80387SX chip -- kinda bizarre thing, an expensive > accelerator for a machine you bought because you didn't need much > speed...
I think it more likely that most people bought the 386SX because they didn't have much money rather than they didn't need much speed. That's certainly the reason I and a couple of friends did. There was also the 80386SL variation which used less power and was particularly good for laptops. As it happens I bought three 80387SL FP co-processors, for my Toshiba T3300SL laptop, for my desktop and one as a Christmas gift. It made a huge difference in number-crunching times. (The 80387SL seems to have replaced the 387SX rather early.) The laptop dual-booted DOS and COHERENT, a commercial 16-bit UNIX-like operating system. When there were no readily-available 32-bit OSs, the 386SX/SL processors seemed to make sense. No good reason for them later... Emilio
