I remember when Mandrake was a young distro -- a redhat derivative -- and they (gasp) chose to compile for i586 instead of i386. People were like VROooooOM! And a bunch of other people were like: why would you target CPU instructions that not everyone has?!
As far as I know, there are still rad hardened 486 chips being made for satellite applications. But my info may be a few years out of date.
The 486DX was the last cpu I truly understood (i did things like disassemble code for it). After the pentium instructions were added, I kind of stopped tracking changes to instruction sets. Now I'd be lucky to follow someone else's assembly with the help of tools. It was a good time for me, back in the day.
Hard to separate the developers from their politics. But once the software is out there, we're in a "Death of the Author" scenario. Usually. For open source software, we could maintain a fork without them, but then we'd need to get a bunch of devs up to speed. So it's an interesting choice.
Sodium walks into a bar, orders a drink and tips the bartender an electron. The bartender asks what it is for. Sodium says: "nothing. Just feeling positive today".
I work in scientific equipment. It helps to focus oneself to occasionally imagine the box as being full of $100k in $100 bills, when I debate whether to leave it in the car or take it inside overnight...
Not quite true. Many homes in Canada literally were ordered from the Eaton catalogue. Truck arrives with all the components, you assemble it yourself. We used to do these things.
I remember when Mandrake was a young distro -- a redhat derivative -- and they (gasp) chose to compile for i586 instead of i386. People were like VROooooOM! And a bunch of other people were like: why would you target CPU instructions that not everyone has?!