While the market for personal computers was growing and the range of their use was expanding dramatically, the FM TOWNS hypermedia personal computer was released in 1989, supporting multimedia data such as music, illustrations, and photographs in addition to applications for text and data processing. Employing Fujitsu-original Towns OS, this was the first computer in the world to be equipped with a CD-ROM drive on its main unit as a standard configuration, and gained great attention as a 32-bit personal computer able to handle music, images, and programs all at once. Price of main unit: from 338,000 yen; main memory: 1 MB to 6 MB

The FM-Towns Architecture was, like the Sharp X68000 series, serious about graphics. The system had hardware sprites, and could display up to 1024 sprites on screen simultaneously, each sprite being 16x16 in 16 colors. There was 128KByte of memory reserved for sprites. Although advanced, the Sharp X68000 had even better sprite hardware for serious action gaming.

The Intel 80386, later renamed to i386, is a 32-bit microprocessor introduced in 1985. It was the 32-bit extension of the 80286 architecture. The instruction set, programming model and binary encoding are common throughout all 32-bit x86 processors, which is now referred to as the x86, or i386-architecture.

The 80386 can correctly execute code intended for the earlier 16-bit processors such as the 8086 and the 80286. Production of the 80386 processors was stopped in 2007. Even though the CPU was no longer used in PCs, it was still used in many embedded systems.