Moore's Law, Part 2: My second computer
6 years later, in 1989, I got a 386 box running DOS. I don’t remember much about its specs, but its hard drive was measured in megabytes, and its RAM wasn’t. It had an amber monochrome monitor.
The killer apps were Turbo C, so I could do my Numerical Computing homework on my very own computer — the first time I did a college programming assignment off of a college machine, Tetris (ultimately uninstalled — too much of a time sink), and, as ever, a terminal emulator.
I tried a couple of times to install Linux, but that was harder in those days. I could never configure my modem, which left me unable to look up HOWTO’s on the net to find out what I was doing wrong.
This was my primary computer for about 7 years (that’s right — I was running DOS on a 386 box through 1995… at least I wholly missed out on Windows 3.1.) I never bonded with it like I did with my Apple (yet the 386 was the one I took with me to California.)
When I replaced it, I gave it to a friend. I don’t miss it and I don’t think about it — in fact, it came as a surprise to me as I wrote this that, yeah, I had it for seven years.
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