Associate
- Joined
- 24 Feb 2004
- Posts
- 1,083
- Location
- Leeds/Cyprus
We bought a 12MHz 80286 back in '90 or '91 (I think). The top-of-the-line back then was the 386 (25MHz was the fastest I think), so we went for the cheap mid-range model costing "only" £1,200~! 
3 months later the 16MHz 386SX came out costing only slightly more than our 286 and my dad was kicking himself for not having waited (setting him down on a path of obsolescence-phobia that even now, 20 years later, makes him paralysed with indecision before buying anything for fear that it'll be immediately outdated, meaning that everything he owns is old and barely working!
)
It was a great PC for its time though, had 1MB of RAM in a day and age when DOS couldn't use more than 640KB - and a lot 0f ~£1,000 PCs wouldn't even ship with that, they'd only give you 512KB! And it had an on-board IDE at a time when if you wanted a hard disk you'd typically buy an ESDI controller on an expansion card to drive it (even high-end PCs that came with hard disks pre-installed often didnt' have it on-board, they'd stick an expansion card in there!) But my dad got scammed by the salesman into buying an SCSI expansion card so he could buy a 48MB 
D) hard disk, as the biggest capacity you could get under IDE back then was only 40MB!
3 months later the 16MHz 386SX came out costing only slightly more than our 286 and my dad was kicking himself for not having waited (setting him down on a path of obsolescence-phobia that even now, 20 years later, makes him paralysed with indecision before buying anything for fear that it'll be immediately outdated, meaning that everything he owns is old and barely working!
)It was a great PC for its time though, had 1MB of RAM in a day and age when DOS couldn't use more than 640KB - and a lot 0f ~£1,000 PCs wouldn't even ship with that, they'd only give you 512KB! And it had an on-board IDE at a time when if you wanted a hard disk you'd typically buy an ESDI controller on an expansion card to drive it (even high-end PCs that came with hard disks pre-installed often didnt' have it on-board, they'd stick an expansion card in there!
) But my dad got scammed by the salesman into buying an SCSI expansion card so he could buy a 48MB D) hard disk, as the biggest capacity you could get under IDE back then was only 40MB!
It was still terrible tho