[aklug] Re: CPU/RAM on older hardware

On 09/04/2010 02:56 PM, Christopher Howard wrote:
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> Hey, those of you (really old people) who had PCs back in the MS-DOS
> days: what were the CPU speed, RAM, and hard drive size of your PC?
>
> When I was real young, I remember my uncle used to play Monkey Island on
> a machine with 80M hard drive space, but I can't remember the other specs.

Ooh - he had a screamer! I remember the rule of thumb back then was the
machine you really wanted cost $5000. Most of us settled for less. My
first box was a 20 mghz 386 Dell with a 40 mb drive divided into two 20
mb partitions as dos couuldn't see more than 32 IIRC. Dell couldn't
even legally install the OS back then. They sold it to me, but I had to
fdisk the drive, format it and install DOS myself.

Even then (late 80s) I eschewed the MS offerings and preferred DR DOS.

I wanted a CAD program, so had to install a math coprocessor in the box
to get half way decent performance. But I had more RAM than I knew what
to do with. Two whole megs!

The question was always whether to use extended or expanded memory - and
the on the ball folks would allocate C000-CFFF for video in config.sys.

Sure a different landscape now...

...Kevin

-- 
Kevin Miller - http://www.alaska.net/~atftb
Juneau, Alaska
In a recent survey, 7 out of 10 hard drives preferred Linux
Registered Linux User No: 307357, http://counter.li.org
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