When inlet produced the 80286 it was to have been the first processor to put the power of a mainframe on your desktop . IBM even emphasized the point by calling the machine they designed to follow the PC the AT – standing foe Advanced Technology . Although the design of the AT took the existing PC architecture and adapted it more towards a true 16 bit form, from the user’s point of view it made little difference. Most, if not all, of the software available until recently treated the AT as if it was a faster version of the PC and there was no software designed to take advantage of its additional powers.
Even so the AT- proved popular and with falling prices became the standard machine for serious work. The irony is that just at the time that the 386/486 became available at reasonable prices, the first software designed for the specially for 286 began to make an impact – foe example OS/2 , Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3 and Windows 3. Of course this software will run perfectly well on a386/486 but it doesn’t use them to the best effect.
In many ways it is best to see the 286 as a false start on the road to a desktop mainframe. It had many flaws that forced software designers to have to compromise and ‘think small’ . Foe example, the 286 still retains some of the 64Kbyte (Kilobyte) Imitations of the original 8088. In a286 system you 64Kbyte chunks or segments. In a 386 system each segment can be as large as 4 Gbytes (Gigabytes) and this allows programmers to work without restriction . It als0 makes it mush easier to move existing mainframe programs to 386’s abilities quickly leads to the notion that the 386 is the processor that the 286 should have been and the sooner the 286 dies out the better
Unfortunately the 286 still has a large , although no longer growing , user base . Even today manufactures are still tempting the occasional user to buy a 286by very low prices. There is also still a luxury and only necessary foe the most demanding application or user . In support of this notion it is frequently said that a 286 will run some applications as fast as a 386 and is cheaper. The error in this argument is that the performance comparisons are based on treating both machines. As if they were just fast 8088/ 86 machines. In other words, if you don’t use any of the special features of the 386 but make them both pretend they are the older 8088/ 86 chip, there isn’t much to chose between them !
IT is already quite clear that the 386 is the dominant processor and will remain so for some years in one from or another . At the moment the penalty for owning a 286 is mainly to be excluded form taking advantage of the 386 –specific modes of some software that will refuse to run on a 286, there is an increasing amount of software that doesn’t perform to its best on a 286 . In the very near future you can expect both operating systems and application software to abandon the need to be 286 compatible and move to a ‘true 32bit – 386’ from . when this happens the 386 will no longer be treated as just a fast 286 with one or two special extras by the software that runs on it but as the full 32-bit powerful processor that it really is. This will reveal the gulf between the 286 once and for all.
To makes this more concrete simply consider Windows . Windows 3 and even Windows 3.1 were both written for the 286 but with extra capabilities to make use of some of the features of the 386. The next version of Windows on the other hand, Windows NT, is being designed specifically fo the 386 family and will not make any attempt to work with the 286. You can see that the very existence of the 286 and the need to be compatible with it has held back progress.
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