This Old Mouse

The title of this blog post may sound a little misleading, but it is in fact the truth. You see the 386SX would have never come about had it not been for the popularity of the 286 and Intel did not like that popularity. Many companies had a license to produce the 286 chip and most of the chips sold were from companies other than Intel. That negatively affected their bottom line. When the 386 came out in 1985, Intel decided not to license it to anyone else, so all sales of the chip would end up in their coffers. The 286 continued to sell like gangbusters and the 386 was just too expensive for most people, so what was Intel going to do about it. Intel came up with the 386SX in 1988 and it was to the 386 just as the 8088 was to the 8086. A less expensive version that could be used in existing 286 systems with just a few modifications. The 386SX differed from the 386 in two ways. It only had a 16-bit versus 32-bit data bus and was limited to 16MB of memory versus 4GB. This made the entry i