Back when a 386 or 486 PC was hot stuff, I remember a common insult for a slow PC being, “What is that thing, a 186?” But no one we knew had a 186 PC, and no one really knew why either. In this blog, post, we will explore the Intel 80186, the CPU the PC industry forgot, why a misconception exists that it was a failure, and how both things can be true at the same time.
Although the 80186 powered two infamous PC-compatible flops in the early 1980s, a company founded by two Californians in a garage did use a 186-compatible CPU in a pioneering handheld computer about a decade later. Additionally, the 186 saw use in other embedded applications.