80286

Armed with a bank account with more money than I probably had ever had in it, I went shopping around for a regular PC. This was a time when the clone market was really starting to take off, and it was making it difficult to decide. For some reason, I decided to spend more on the graphics capability - probably after several years of staring at the PCjr's CGA screen. Once I saw a super VGA display, I had to have it. I had beautiful text for several years, but SVGA took quite a while to be fully utilized due to lack of standards, so I had very little good graphics before my hardware was too slow to run it.

I had myself a 286 at a whopping 12MHz (16 MHz just cost too much at the time). I think I did get the full 640KB RAM, and the amazingly vast 1.2MB floppy drive with a 360K drive as well. A 1200 bps modem to connect to the university computer, DOS 3.3, a box of floppy disks, and my tight 12" SVGA monitor with a honkin' 512KB SVGA card. I think I got out of there for around $2400. I remember when writing the check out, I hadn't left quite enough room since I'd not writen a check for such a large amount before.

I left with a Packard Bell made in California (before they became absolute crap) bought from the SoftWarehouse in Dallas, which later became the first CompUSA. Once again, investing in the PC. It didn't even have a hard drive. Why? At the time, I could fit WordStar and the Fortran compiler on one 1.2MB floppy. All my data could fit on one or two disks. The next summer I had saved up for a hard drive as my storage needs increased at a rapid pace. The 40MB harddrive was a vast tract of hyperspace by comparison.

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