One of my first temp jobs after grad school was working for a small company in Dayton that sold banking software (a clone of NCR's Banker80, I think) that ran on 286s. I was hired to be a typist because I knew WordPerfect. They then wanted me to work on some new fangled thing called "hypertext" for their Help system. It was kind of a disaster because they wanted me to translate the jargon into English as well as do the data entry and link-making. It was ungodly slow on a 286 - "that's Ok, we'll just sell them faster computers!". Someone else took it over after I flailed around at it for a week or so - I don't know if they ever made anything useful with it.

I bought my first computer of my very own a few years later - a Gateway 486/25 SCSI system that was $4000. And about $1000 cheaper 6 months later. :-/ Put a 486/66 in it a year or two later.

My dad got me a Sinclair ZX something or other when I was a kid, but I never could see the point of it. I mean it was amazing for $99 or whatever it was, but what could it do that was actually interesting? Ooh! I can calculate pi!! WooHoo!! :-/

:-)

Cheers,
Scott.