Taken: AT 286 motherboard with mathco

On 10/14/07, Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. <rescue at hawkmountain.net> wrote: 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