Taken: AT 286 motherboard with mathco

[Ethan Dicks]

On 10/14/07, Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. <rescue at hawkmountain.net> wrote:
> > Am I the only one who never got into 286 systems (my 1st pc in the late 80's
> > was a Packard Bell 286/12)?
> >
> I think skipping a generation wasn't uncommon.... I skipped the 386
> generation... went from my 286-20 to a  486DX-33.  I skipped the
> pentium pro generation too

Since I came from Commodores on the low end and PDPs on the high end,
when I was buying hardware in the 1980s and 1990s, I went from a $100
8088 running DOS, skipping the 286, to an AMD 386-DX/40 that I
originally bought in 1992 to run Linux, but later ran DOS and Windows
games on it (including beta-testing "Return to Zork" for Activision).

Eventually, the 386-DX/40 gave way to an AMD 486-DX/80, then that was
replaced by a Pentium-90. I made a career of upgrading when the CPUs
were under $100 each, about two years behind the curve, IIRC.  I never
did own any Pentium-Pro hardware, but some of my friends did, and
except for laptops, not too much in the P-II or P-III line.  Still
don't own any P-4 gear.

OTOH, I'm still using an AMD 1400MHz Athlon as my main machine at home
- the motherboard was free from a former boss in 2001, and the current
CPU in it was, you guessed it, $99.99 at the Dayton Computerfest (a
defunct show that was in the odd quarters from the Dayton Hamfest, but
still at Hara Arena).

I do *not* miss the days of DOS.  I only dabbled in it to run certain
apps (Morse code trainers, games, device programmers, etc. - except
for one job, for CompuServe, where I was actually *paid* to program a
DOS app - *shudder*.  As such, I escaped the
must-upgrade-as-often-as-possible mentality I saw in friends who were
100% hard-core DOS users in the 8088-286-386-486 days.  I just got one
machine and stuck with it until it just plain wouldn't run some game I
wanted to play, then that was enough impetus to find a new
$100-or-less CPU/video card/sound card/etc.

-ethan