[ChuckMcM]

Wow, trip down memory lane. My "starter" project when I joined Intel out of college was to be the Systems Validation engineer for the 80186. Unlike the 8086 it was this new fangled thing called a "system on chip" (SoC) which of course is what nearly everything is these days. And because Intel chose the peripherals to put "on chip" as it were they picked the ones they liked, and Microsoft obligingly wrote a version of MS-DOS that could use those peripherals. Critically though, they were not exactly like the set of peripherals the IBM PC used so while it was "cheaper" to put all the interface chips together with the CPU (saving power, board real estate, and time) it meant using the chip would never be "FlightSimulator" compatible (where MS Flight Sim was considered the acid test of whether or not a clone was a clone.). So much commercial software bypassed the BIOS and wrote directly to the peripherals that the 80186 never became very popular in the commercial sector. It did however have a pretty strong military presence and a lot of the customers who sent in bug reports would decline to describe their systems :-)

[drmpeg]

It did however have a pretty strong military presence...

The ground communications network for the Air Force DSP satellite program (boost phase missile warning) was built with 80186 processors. The hub routers were multi-processor systems with six 80186's or five 80186's and a 80386.

These systems were used to provide early warning of SCUD missile attacks during the first Gulf War. They were installed in 1988 and decommissioned in 2005.

[exikyut]

Less amazing, but: some recent-model (non-current) ATMs used 80386s to control the hydraulics and motors for the cash dispenser. My guess is these ATMs were manufactured sometime starting around 2004 at the earliest.

(ATMs use a complex system of pressurized tubes to extract and move notes out of the bins. I think the idea is that the extra complexity fails more easily as a kind of canary, but I'm not sure.)

[exikyut]

I've heard that the 8086/8088 were used in warheads as the guide computers from the radar and other bits. I'm curious how on-point this is.

Now I'm reminded of the story of the engineer who had to face a very tricky debugging scenario when dealing with the sensing/optics assembly for a missile... it didn't use heatsinks, because the production lifetime of the system was just enough seconds shorter than the overheating point that none were needed.

(Pretty sure I stumbled on that from here but I cannot possibly remember exactly where, sorry.)

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Thus why the 80186 was mostly skipped in favour of the 80286, right?