"John Rumm" wrote in message
o.uk...


Segmentation was a complete ******* without proper paging 386 was first
DECENT 32 bitter

'286 would have been ok(ish) if it were not for the legacy of PCs and DOS.
You really needed the complexity of the 386 to tame those. The 386' was
the first processor I met where it took 20 mins to acclimatise to the new
assembler, and then months to get a handle all the wrinkles of the
architecture.

The 386 was designed to run Unix not DOS.
the DOS stuff was thrown in as an afterthought.

Apart from the Fortran I did at school, I learnt to program on the 8086.
I didn't find it a problem.
It did take a few weeks to produce working code.