I seen a few 486 boxes but never a 386. Then again I never looked for a 386 box ether.

Most stores that sold computers back then just sold computers and stuff like hard drives, CDROM kits etc in retail boxes but I never seen a CPU. Math coprocessors did come in retail boxes.
Custom PC building was a thing back then, you just ordered with a phone and a credit card from a place out in CA that got shipments in from Asia directly. People also ordered from mail order catalogs like computer shopper or from traveling computer shows. The thing is all those places got chips in trays and just packaged them for shipping. They were like a grey market for chip overstocks from the major manufactures of computers that needed to dump inventory.

Now that you mention it, I vaguely remember ads in the usual print magazines from the early 90's with price lists for PC components including CPU's. So yes, I agree, custom PC building was a thing to a certain extent. Would be interesting to see a 386/486 box if there ever was one.

Back then when I built 486 computers the motherboards definitely had retail boxes, although almost all of them were completely generic, without any branding other than stuff like "Mainboard" or "Computer Motherbard".

But I never saw boxed processors (besides the overdrives) until around the PPro/MMX era. Generally the processors would already be installed in the motherboard or in some sort of tray/foam when sold separately.

Pretty sure there were. Even the 287XL was already sold as retail.

The only CPU retail boxes I remember from back then were Upgrade CPUs and math Coprocessors. I don't remember ever seeing regular CPUs in boxes before the pentium era.

386 based maybe RapidCAD, what was 486DX in a 386DX pinout.

Only "overdrives" were boxed for retail sales, until the Pentium MMX.

Unknown_K wrote:

Most stores that sold computers back then just sold computers and stuff like hard drives, CDROM kits etc in retail boxes but I never seen a CPU. Math coprocessors did come in retail boxes.
Custom PC building was a thing back then, you just ordered with a phone and a credit card from a place out in CA that got shipments in from Asia directly. People also ordered from mail order catalogs like computer shopper or from traveling computer shows. The thing is all those places got chips in trays and just packaged them for shipping. They were like a grey market for chip overstocks from the major manufactures of computers that needed to dump inventory.

Or they got them from microcenter

r.cade wrote:

Only "overdrives" were boxed for retail sales, until the Pentium MMX.

Ppro and pre mmx were boxed