On 2/5/2016 9:26 PM, philo wrote:
On 02/05/2016 07:54 PM, wrote:
nder my mother got so mad when he bought it."

My former brother-in-law was a "financial planner" and "Investment
broker" who always had to have the best - at least in his mind. It was
champaign living on a beer budjet but he spent the money. His first PC
compatible (pre XT days) cost him just over $2000 - then another $2000
for a hard drive a few weeks later, Then another $3000 for a high
resolution colour display set-up -I think it was an EGA but not sure -
may well have been some standard that never caught on- so he had about
3 times as much tied up in his computer as in his new Country Squire
wagon - and then he just absolutely HAD to have a Laserjet printer -
another $3000.

I don't think he ever made enough in that business to even pay for his
equipment - they lived on my sister's earnings as a nurse.

Even though I was around back in the punch card days, by 1982 I was so sick of
computers I said I would never touch one again...and except for doing my
inventory at work, pretty much stuck to that.

My second "set of experiences" with computers was punching cards on an
IBM mainframe, "batch". Prior to that, a Bell 103 modem alongside an
ASR 33.

In 1995 my (now) wife spent $1600 for a Packard Bell P-1 75 mhz with 8 megs of
RAM, I thought for sure she was nuts.

In ~`86 I dropped ~$8K -- TWICE -- for a (pair of) 25MHz 386's with 13M of RAM,
each. Back when you had a video CARD and a printer/serial CARD and a sound
CARD and a SCSI HBA (card) and a network interface CARD and an external CD-ROM
(nothing writeable, yet) ... :

(i.e., number of ISA slots was *important*!)

When she got a P-II a few years later she gave her old machine to me so I
figured I might as well fool with it...and before too long got hooked.

Put in a 200 mhz cpu and maxed the RAM out to 256megs

a 20 Gig HD and dual booted Win98 and RedHat 5.2

My real computer knowledge started trying to get Linux installed and running.
Took me six months before I got everything configured properly.

I started running FreeBSD in '92 (v 0.9) and NetBSD about the same time
(v 0.8). Downloading dozens of 5 inch "floppy images" with a 19K modem
over a dialup line onto one of those 386 boxes. (I used external 4G SCSI
drives at that point so I could just swap the entire disk enclosure
out and be running Windows one day, FreeBSD the next and NetBSD the
day after!). I used to keep a shelf in the closet with bare 4G SCSI
drives each labeled with a sticker telling me what "system" it contained.

Back then, I was more active in the FOSS community ("made the time" to
be so). Now, there aren't enough hours in the day for me to do what
*I* want to do, let alone contribute to others! :-/