Comeback

It's not that I really couldn't afford a new monitor, but that it would put a serious dent in the money I was saving to upgrade my computer. By now, I could have afforded a reasonable 386 upgrade, but I had the bug, and I had to have a 486 if I wanted to play computer games reasonably well. That also meant a good sound card. During this time, I was heavily interested in operating systems and was studying them in school. At work, we got a sample disk of IBM OS/2 2.1, and installed it. It was really cool. So cool that I had to run it at home. I found out that a new version was coming out soon that had reduced memory requirements, and so I might be able to just afford the 4MB it would need versus the unthinkable 8MB it currently needed. I began to save even more money, and was able to get the RAM chips off the dead 286 boards piling up turned into SIMMs. I finally was able to get my 486 with 4MB RAM, SVGA (thanks to a used monitor), with a nice sound card and a CD-ROM. I was back. I got my special deal on the new version of OS/2 for $30, and I was having a great time.

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