You heard it here first, folks - your 386 computer is entirely obsolete.
And woe be unto those who possess a 286. Nobody - but nobody - is writing software for that machine anymore.The 386 was a marvel when it first came out.
It could multitask, sort of.
In reality, it would usually shut off one application while running another, but what the heck - it was still a marvel.
And even today, most popular applications will run on a 386.
But it is obsolete nonetheless.
The reason?
Multimedia.
The multimedia standard calls for a minimum of a 386 with four megabytes of system memory, a sound card and a CD-ROM device.
But that's just a minimum standard, and today, it's virtually impossible to find a computer for sale that includes a sound card and a CD-ROM while based on Intel's venerable 80386 microprocessor.
CD-ROM is the 386's real killer.
According to Reston, Va.-based PC Data, six of last year's top-selling computer games came out on CD-ROM.
And of the top 10 educational programs sold for personal computers, four came on CD.
Overall, retail software sales increased 19 percent between 1993 and 1994, and a whole lot of those programs came on CD-ROM.
CD-ROMs hold large amounts of information - usually about 650 megabytes.
So, if you're playing a game like LucasArts Entertainment's new "Dark Forces," the CD version will let you call up video clips and sound that conventional disk-based programs just can't deliver.
And the CD-ROM's large volume of information makes for more data to load into your computer, making for a bigger game.
Without CD-ROM, projects like "Material World: A Global Family Portrait" from San Francisco's StarPress Multimedia would be impossible.
Narrated by Charles Kuralt, this CD contains intimate looks into the lives of 30 families from around the world, revealing just about everything you might want to know about the way different cultures live - from toilets to television.
And the CD-ROM has changed the way we deal with information.
CD-ROMs gave birth to the concept of "shovelware," where companies pile a lot of information into a disk with little regard to how it is arranged.
The shovelware concept, in turn, allowed people to put books on CD, and to enhance their qualities.
For example, Philips has just put "The Joy of Sex" on CD, with a pricetag of just $29.95.
That's close to what you'd pay for a hardcover book, but with the book, you wouldn't get to play a new "Joy of Sex" game available exclusively on the CD.
And, yes, those very graphic drawings that accompanied the original book are there, along with three hours of commentary and a series of "intimate video sequences."
CDs are cheap to produce and defy efforts to pirate them - at least by casual hackers.
For these reasons, a lot of the newest and hottest software is coming out on CD.
Even games like Los Angeles-based 7th Level's "Take Your Best Shot," which should logically go on diskettes, is only available on CD.
"Take Your Best Shot" includes a series of arcade games, screen savers, wallpapers and audio clips featuring the bizarre artwork of "animaniac" Bill Plympton.
Games typically don't take up a lot of memory, so the publishers of this CD-ROM made up for it by putting a lot of games on one disk.
Even tried-and-true products, items designed to be downward-compatible, are jumping on the CD-ROM bandwagon.
"Wildcat!," probably the best-selling computer bulletin board software out today, has just come out with a new incremental version designed, among other things, to support CD-ROM drives in such a way that "adding a new CD-ROM of downloadable files to `Wildcat!' is as simple as dropping in a pre-made database," according to the manufacturer.
By the way, "Wildcat! 4.1" will still run on a 286, if you want it to.