who needs pentiums.
the 286 386s are just awesome. when you want to use real slow speeds there is nothing but the real deal.
any emulator also has no charm to me.
luckily i have a real 286-25 😀
@archsan:
About pipelining... true "tight" pipelining (as in RISC processors) was 1st introduced by i486 in x86 family. Pentium has double-pipelined architecture.
The 386, 286, and even the 8086 was already somewhat pipelined, i.e. they all had somewhat overlapping fetch, decode, execution (calculation), and write back; however, "tightly pipelined" (or "RISC-like") usually means that the pipeline stages overlaps 100% for important instructions, i.e. that all stages are bound to perform their respective duties within the same length time slot. In contrast "loosely pipelined" usually implies that some kind of buffering is used to decouple the units and allow them to work a little more independently. Both the original 8086 and the high performance x86-chips of today are, although very different, "loosely pipelined" in this sense.
