I am genuinely surprised. I had never heard of an 80186.

Such a rarity these days. I have immense respect for the hardware hackers who are writing drivers with little or no documentation. Especially for contemporary hardware.

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The older chips often have data sheets with full instruction sets. Firmware was unheard of. There were zero security concerns in older stuff. It's modern stuff that's really awkward by comparison.

Not exactly.. Most chips also had "errata" published, which listed all the command/operand combinations that DIDN'T work as the data sheets would lead you to believe. Several famous "bugs" like FDIV, FOOF, etc. Any CPU of any complexity probably has a few.

Back then, computers were rarely networked, and even if they were, it was company-wide, not world-wide. And if your company has someone trying to hack your own systems, you have a lot more issues than a CPU that could possibly be hacked.

In 2021, it's become possible to make $$ by hacking people's computers / stealing secret data, etc, so there are some people who do it.

For example: just googling 8086 errata:
https://www.pcjs.org/documents/manuals/intel/8086/

Wrong sequence of instructions may corrupt memory. That's a pretty obvious security concern, IMHO.

Edit: That's the FIRST hit of 800K+ on "8086 errata". Here's the same page for the 80386:
https://www.pcjs.org/documents/manuals/intel/80386/

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Speaking of errata, there was a whole branch of industry on illegal opcodes of the Commodore 64's CPU alone (the 6502).

So yes, old hardware was both ridden with bugs and insecure as any ever

The C64/6502 illegal opcodes weren't bugs, they were bonus features! 6502-NMOS.extra.opcodes

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I think his point was you were not deal with "security features" like locked boot loaders, deliberately obfuscated firmware and roms, code signing on firmware etc; not that they did not consider security or think it important just that they did not consider the machines owner part of the threat model.

Now days half the security stuff in electronics is there to lock you out.

The customers are elsewhhere; we are mere products now days - sheeple endangering the gadgets milking us

It was intended to be a microcontroller/embedded processor.

It was also used in some HP handhelds.

My oldest computer was a Big Track!

Today they have bots cruising around delivering meds;but in the mid 70's, I programmed my big track to navigate our home and deliver an apple to my mother: just like the commercial.

Last week I was given a very old PC, it has only a AMD DX40, it has everything to work, HDD, memory, network card with BNC connector, serial and parallel connectors but the video is out of order. When I power it on, it seems to boot, normal noise. The person who gave it to me, had tested it not that long ago before the graphic card died.
It is a VLB card that is needed, and I've searched here in France but no avalaible. I want to revive that ancestor and install the oldest Slackware distribution I have. Look at the photo to see the types of connectors (ISA 8 bits and ISA 16 bits connectors)
Has anyone that kind of graphic card?

I also got a very old bi-Xeon with 2xE5645 cpu for a bite of bread (100€) with an integrated graphic card AST2050, but with no hdd.I had a spare ssd I put on it.

Despite I can 'make -j 25' to build gcc.SlackBuild (48 mn), it's less powerful than my i7-6700 PC (45 mn).They are on the same network, and bought a cheap KVM switch to use one or the other with only one set of kbd/mouse/screen.
I would like to use the 2 PC (i7-6700 and the bi-Xeon) and with the help of icecream or distcc improve my ability to build Slackware From Scratch, but for the time being no success, help and advice would be welcome!

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Saw this one on EBay, based in France by the look of it:

https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Cirrus-Logic...0AAOSwt-heOx5S

Whether it would work with your old 486 or not....

VLB = Vesa Local Bus??

1990s IIRC. That's a bit of history. I'm sure Wikipedia has something on them. There were also ISA video cards and EISA cards. While you're on the job, I'd source some 1.44MB floppies, and a drive. Some of the older drives got a bit abrasive.

Even though a particular motherboard has a VLB bus, one is not required to use a VLB video card --- an ISA video will work.

According to my vague recollection, once upon a time I had two VLB motherboards running concurrently, and I think I had only one VLB video card. I think one computer had the VLB video card and ran Windows 3.11 with networking. The other, I am fairly certain was my fileserver running Slackware, and I think it had a Hercules ISA video card.

Hercules was the absolute pits as far as video cards were concerned. Poor you. It was designed as a CP/M type 80x25 monitor output and little more, I thought. The thing was, guys writing games programs (along the lines of the bsd games) didn't want to lose sales so they put time into programming for them so they could improve sales. It was the kind of card you didn't sell, you gave them away in breakfast cereal packets