The 8087 chip I added on to my 8086 system sits on my monitor pedestal, forever. Right now, it's next to my ()&(^&^%%$%^ Pixel 2 XL USB C audio connector. I was a grad student in numerical analysis and holy smokes! Hardware IEEE 754 floating point!
Sometime aroundish 1988 I paid $600 for an 80MB hard drive, out of a $12K/yr stipend. Good times.
4KB TRS-80 Color Computer, which would have been $400 in 1980. Wasn't my own computer as it was my father's and I was a bit too young to get deep into programming until 1983 or so.
First computer that was strictly mine was a CoCo 3 in 1986, and the first one I built entirely myself was a 486-66 back in 1993.
I was basically the same, although I think we upgraded it somehow to 16K. I remember typing in source code from magazines (Rainbow, in particular).
I thought MS Extended Basic on the CoCo was pretty cool.
Ended up moving to Apple ][ a few years after that, but still have very fond memories of the CoCo, even though everyone else I knew had something else and liked to refer to my computer as a Trash 80.
Windows ran fine on a 286. Even with just 1 MB of RAM. You just couldn't launch more than a couple of big applications at a time without severe swapping.
Yep, you could run 3.1 in "real mode" instead of "protected mode" but the 286 was kind of a dog of a CPU and it had some pretty nasty flaws that led to 286 machines not really being all that common compared to 80886 and 386 ones.
3.1 couldn’t run in real mode. It could run either in standard mode or in enhanced mode. The enhanced mode was 386-only.
3.0 on the other hand could run in real mode so it technically could be used with 8086.
You're right, I had Real and Standard mixed up. You definitely didn't want to run 3.0, though. That was a complete mess, and the beginning point of where Microsoft started to make a turn-around in stability.
3.0 would crash every 15 minutes on average.
3.1 would crash every 45 minutes on average.
95 would go a day at a time, 98 would go several days, XP was stable a month at a time when there weren't major exploits or bad driver behavior.
...and so on. I may be overstating the impact SLIGHTLY, but 3.0 really was crash prone to the point magazines heavily pushed people to 3.1 when that came out, and 95 was definitely significantly improved over that, and so forth (skipping ME, of course) until XP.
In my experience, Windows 98 crashed more often, mostly due to running out of "resources". Windows 98 GUI was more complex, thus wasting more of these "resources", running out and crashing.
XP, on the other hand, practically never crashed, unless you had bad drivers. Just like Windows NT4 & 2000 before it.
Very close to my first "real" (well technically my dad's) computer - he had a custom workstation at home to do some work on but the 386 was the first PC we got. He went out of his way to get a DX and it had an 80 MB SCSI drive and 4 MB of RAM.
I spent literally HOURS trying every single driver on the SimCity 2000 CD until I found one that worked - it was an OAK videocard with the bare minimum of RAM needed.
I was stuck with a 386/16Mhz/40 megs hd, and a whopping megabyte of ram.
At least it taught me that it was sometimes worth optimizing my code...