On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 11:04:34PM -0400, Nick Holland wrote:

quoted text
>

> 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