[SGVLUG] 486s came with about 8 to 16Mb of RAM?...

[jmd]

On May 25, 2006, at 4:14 PM, Michael Proctor-Smith wrote:

> On 5/25/06, Brian Truong <brian at hostinc.net> wrote:
>> My first 486 was a Packard Bell 486SX and it came with 4MB of RAM.
>
> My first 486 had 1M of memory because I could not afford more and I
> knew I could easily upgrade memory when I had more money. But I
> believe the 486 had a 32bit address bus so it could theoretically
> support 2GB of memory but of coarse at $50,000 per MB not many people
> where building systems to support that much memory. I had at least one
> 486 with 64MB of memory.

my first board was a octek dca2. maybe some here remember it. the  
design was radically different. and it was quite fast in comparison  
to those boards i benchmarked it against. the board was not designed  
with normal cache of the day (256k on the motherboard), rather the  
first 2 slots of memory were able to accept 15ns memory and the cpu  
would take whatever was needed from the first and/or second stick of  
this 15ns memory. the other 2 slots were populated with regular 60ns  
memory. i saved for an 8MB 15ns sticked and a regular 8MB 60ns stick.  
i believe this board supported 64 or 128MB, but the price of 15ns mem  
was prohibitive for that configuration.

there was a lot of controversy surrounding this type of board. a lot  
of people said it was more hoax than real. the 15ns memory was very  
very expensive back than, and the restrictions of memory  
configuration were problematic if you wanted to upgrade.

scroll down to octek hippo dca2: http://redhill.net.au/b/b-95.html

after i built this computer i used a standard benchmark app that ran  
on win 3.1 and this board was always coming out on top when  
benchmarked against my friends' computers.

a friend of mine helped me build it. he had a degree in comp science  
(however he liked sailing better and quit working in IT). he loved  
unix and hated windows (this was around 1994-5). by chance, i bought  
a book on linux with a slackware cd in it, his eyes lit up when he  
saw it,  and we sat up nite after nite trying first to install it on  
his computer, then we did mine. if i remember right it was 14 or 15  
floppies to install it because i had a panasonic 1x cdrom and we  
could not find drivers for the panasonic protocol.

the next board i bought was a dec alpha 275 mhz. fast for the day! i  
don't think i bought another x86 board until 1999 or so. last year i  
bought an apple ibook...my first ever brand new complete computer.

jeff