On Wed, 6 Aug 2025, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote: > 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!
Well, the very same year MIPS Computer Systems came up with the R2000, a classic RISC design, featuring a(n almost) non-interlocked pipeline design and with the same 4GiB paged virtual addressing capability and memory protection also giving true multitasking. A processor architecture the descendants of which live in millions of devices around the world, and which inspired other architectures such as DEC Alpha or more recently RISC-V. Maciej
