Are we part of a collective mind ? Do social networks algorithms shape society that deeply that we all end up having about the same random thoughts ?
This is really scary in a way.
Yesterday there was something similar that might have planted a seed in your mind like it did for other people.
You own a red Mercedes now and suddenly you see only red Mercedes' on the streets.
I wonder if anyone outside of Intel has discovered the actual bug in the circuitry yet.
Besides the multiplication, the 386 had quite a number of teething problems[1], including occasionally broken addressing modes, unrecoverable exceptions, virtual address resolution bugs around the 2G mark, etc...
A while ago, there was also an article posted here that analyzed the inner workings of the Windows/386 loader[2]. Interestingly, Windows simply checks a pair of instruction (XBTS/IBTS) that early 386 steppings had, but was later removed, raising an invalid opcode exception instead.
Raymond Chen also wrote a blog post describing a few workarounds that Windows 95 had implemented[3].
[1] https://www.pcjs.org/documents/manuals/intel/80386/
[2] https://virtuallyfun.com/2025/09/06/unauthorized-windows-386...
[3] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110112-00/?p=11...
The three-operand form of IMUL also already existed on those processors.
>This wasn't just an incremental upgrade—it was the foundation that would carry the PC architecture for decades to come.
AI?
Probably not; this point is well justified by both theory and practice. Supporting suitably larger operands is indeed what naturally comes following the increase of computation demands.
One point I do differ from the author is that register width don't necessarily correlate with the size of address space. Even 8bit machines can address a large space by splitting apart the logical address and using multiple registers. Likewise, having a wide register does not imply the same address width.