[rescue] Sun 486i (was: SunPC drivers for solaris and sunos)

[Andrew Jones]

> On Mar 20, 2018, at 07:33, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 20 March 2018 at 12:24, Walter Belgers <walter+rescue at belgers.com> wrote:
>> 
>> I guess they must have been pretty similar looking to the 386i though? Just
>> with another motherboard inside.
> 
> I did a little Googling. It sounds like it. I wonder if Sun used any
> kind of 32-bit expansion bus, though?
> 
> ISA wasn't good on a 386, but it was a major limitation on a 486. An
> ex of mine had a 486SX PC with only ISA slots, no local bus at all --
> they did exist. I put 32MB of RAM in it, and a 486 DX2/66 chip, but it
> was a dog of a PC and there was little else I could do to improve it.
> 

8/16 bit ISA was a dog, sure.  Specifically, most of the cards for old time ISA were dumb as rocks and expected the CPU to dote on them.

Full width EISA buses werenbt too bad by late 1980s standards.  32 bits at 8 MHz, bus mastering etc etc.  And folks built passable Unix machines on that substrate.