Re: Very Different
In the summer of 1990 I saw some sales figures that indicated that volume of 32bit INMOS Transputers shipped *exceeded* the Intel 80386 by some margin...
At the time the 386 really didn't have the kind of volume in sales (relative to it's even shittier forebears) that made it worthwhile in the eyes of the vendors to ship software for it. The best '386 platform that I came across at that time was the Sun 386i, but even that fell between the cracks... On on hand SunOS made great use of the hardware and it was a pretty capable box, on the other hand it was a waste of time (and money) to run DOS applications on it because UNIX made better use of the hardware than DOS. Furthermore by 1990 you had Solbourne SPARC SMP boxes that kerb-stomped 386s (about 3-4x as fast at the same clock) when it came to running UNIX apps. Going back to a 386 PC after having a (2 socket) Solbourne Series 5 to myself was pretty hard. :)