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points by jerf 2 days ago | 0 comments

It also hung on for some time past when it made sense. My father had a 486/33MHz that had a "turbo" button. Turning off turbo could slow the clock down but it wouldn't do anything about the fact that the 486 is still fundamentally a better processor than either the 386 or the 286, running 2-3 times faster on the same instruction stream than a 386. So even with turbo off, the programs that was nominally supposed to help with still ran much faster than they were supposed to.

[–] NikolaNovak 2 days ago

Right; what I don't recall - once we had the 486 DX/2 and DX/4, I don't think Turbo button did anything about the multiplier between CPU and mobo. I think to your point it would do overall clock and other things to try to slow it down, with limited success.

Ahh the good old times :-)

[–] marcosdumay 2 days ago

The "nominal speed" of every 486 that it ran with the turbo off was 25MHz.

There were some programs made for that speed, but not nearly as many as when the problem happened for the first time on the 286. Most developers have learned timing practices at that point, and the APIs have improved a lot.