First post, by dave343
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I've always been fascinated by the availably of a CPU generation vs what people were actually running due to the realistic affordability for a given time period.
According to Wikipedia page for the 386, 486, & Pentium systems (for both AMD & Intel), there is a lot of cross over of release dates between the late 1980's to the mid 1990's. The 386DX may have officially been released back in 1988-89 but I doubt everyone and their grandmother were running out to buy one due to the high cost. And while the 486 was "officially" released in 1989, Intel only released the DX4 in October of 1994 so I also can't imagine many people were running a shiny new 486 in 1990.
For example; In 1992, my father bought a AMD 386DX 33 that had the Cyrix FasMath FPU chip, he upgraded the ram to 8MB at time of purchase, and if memory serves me it had a 120MB Hard drive, but no sound card. I believe the PC cost around $3000 in 1992 and the only reason we were able to get it was the company he worked for covered most of the cost. Before this, we had a Commodore 64 up until that point! We skipped the 486 generation and moved to a Pentium MMX in mid 1997.
I use to always assume that if the 386 was officially out in the late 80's that was the norm, and if the 486 was around in 1990 everyone was must have been running one. It wasn't until much later I realized the super high cost of these systems and how long people actually held onto their 386 / 486 systems.
So I'm curious to know what system you were running in the very early 90's (Say 1989-1994) When did you buy your first 386/486 system, and how long did you keep running it as your main/only computer?