Question:
Are there today any 386 instances running somewhere in the basement to do some productive stuff, maybe processing only some controller data once a day?
I remember the link some month ago where that one small shop ran completely on an old Amiga (?IIRC, not sure, was linked here)
Around 98/99 I was involved in a small IT-management company serving SME around the region, we had a client producing distinct metal objects with a big press; this got feeded once a day with a 5.25 floppy from another machine with production data - and it was still in use while we had already ethernet/USB/3.5 floppies etc. :-D
I wonder how many of those are actually still out there. According to Wikipedia, Intel kept making replacement parts (386 and 486) until September 2007, but personally, I have never come across one in actual use. My own career in this field began with an internship in 2008. Since 2016, my day job includes working on a PLC runtime with a code base older than myself, originally written for DOS, but every industrial PC (or other x86 based embedded device) I have ever got to play around with had at the very least a Pentium class CPU in it.
As for the Windows 3.x based industrial equipment: Some industrial devices I have worked on in the past turned out to actually be ARM based, running Linux, but the software went a long way to convincingly fake old Windows style UI or even a DOS prompt. I was once tasked to extend a UI library to reproduce Windows 98 style color gradient window borders faithfully.
Only once have I seen an actual embedded 486SX with my own eyes. Last year, someone dragged a weirdo Siemens telephony box to the the local Hackerspace. But obviously not in active use anymore. The box itself had a design language that screamed "Star Trek: Voyager". I found a UART, it was running "On Time RTOS-32" which, according to the German Wikipedia, was developed by a German company and discontinued in 2023. It supposedly has a Windows API compatible userspace.
A few years ago there was a story where the single Amiga that ran an entire US school district's HVAC was replaced with a system costing like 1.5 million dollars, after 30 years of dutiful service.
I can't think of examples offhand but you bet your ass there are donut shops and auto body repair services running 386s to do POS, inventory, and the like. Some of them may be driving terminals off Xenix.
Funny thing about this is that the character-based systems of that era, whether PC-type or host+terminal type, were most of the time so much faster and more responsive than the laggy, over-animated, touchscreen trash they always replace them with in order to get big screens and prettier graphics.
The Amiga was not character-based, it ran an accelerated framebuffer (with support for scanning out multiple resolutions and color depths on a single screen).
Sorry, I was generalizing the "typical" pre-1995 system one would find in commercial installations, which in general were character-based. But I'm sure the Amiga solution would have been nice and fast too, since they were pretty powerful and programmers back then didn't feel the need to bring in PhoneGap, React, or 5,280 npm packages in order to display what amounts to a form.
Not really. The 386 does not have an interface to read the ROM direclty. Instead, it uses the Built-In Self-Test (BIST) to verify the ROM's contents. It's basically a checksum-like mechanism that verify the integrity of the CROM.
They might also run Linux kernel 3.7, that supported i386. Gray386linux is still maintained, and runs a patched 3.7 kernel.
https://github.com/marmolak/gray386linux
I remember the link some month ago where that one small shop ran completely on an old Amiga (?IIRC, not sure, was linked here)
Around 98/99 I was involved in a small IT-management company serving SME around the region, we had a client producing distinct metal objects with a big press; this got feeded once a day with a 5.25 floppy from another machine with production data - and it was still in use while we had already ethernet/USB/3.5 floppies etc. :-D
A ton of industrial equipment are still using win 3.1.
As for the Windows 3.x based industrial equipment: Some industrial devices I have worked on in the past turned out to actually be ARM based, running Linux, but the software went a long way to convincingly fake old Windows style UI or even a DOS prompt. I was once tasked to extend a UI library to reproduce Windows 98 style color gradient window borders faithfully.
Only once have I seen an actual embedded 486SX with my own eyes. Last year, someone dragged a weirdo Siemens telephony box to the the local Hackerspace. But obviously not in active use anymore. The box itself had a design language that screamed "Star Trek: Voyager". I found a UART, it was running "On Time RTOS-32" which, according to the German Wikipedia, was developed by a German company and discontinued in 2023. It supposedly has a Windows API compatible userspace.
I can't think of examples offhand but you bet your ass there are donut shops and auto body repair services running 386s to do POS, inventory, and the like. Some of them may be driving terminals off Xenix.
I immediately wondered ... how long the new system would last or be used .... and how long it would be problem free ?
[0] https://github.com/spinalhdl/vexriscv
so there's still a chance