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Comment by gandalfian | Hacker News Reader

I did my schoolwork on a 286 laptop. It was cheap... Pleasant gray-scale screen, Dos 6, windows 3.1 with pipes and reversi it was really OK. Duke nukem 2d, joust and lemmings all in 1mb of ram. Wasn't that bad really.

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In my first semester of Computer Science (early 2000s) I had the issue that my family computer was always busy. So I took our 286 from the closet and set it up in my room - I just needed a C compiler after all, and 34Mb hard drive space ought to be enough for everybody. I wanted to use Linux but you need a 386 or higher for that, and DOS was already installed anyway.

After about a month my mom convinced my father to get me a new PC, probably annoyed by the sound of the dot matrix printer at night. But honestly, I agree with you: it wasn't that bad.

I learned to program on that setup at home in 4th grade.

Games wouldn’t run right, so I got the big dos manual and read the entire thing and started messing with boot setting to free more memory

Even if you didn't run many (or any TSRs like Sidekick), there was a bit of fiddling to maximize the amount of the first 640K bytes available. IIRC, you could load the commonly used Microsoft stuff in the upper memory 384K.

This seems to be close to what I used to do:

https://www.computerhope.com/ac.htm

I could have written your comment. I sometimes think that it's not that children learn faster, it's just that they are used to be totally lost and keep trying

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