It's about right if you grew up poor in that time period, and bought something secondhand. I was part of a small club out in the (impoverished) country where we were learning on DOS computers using Qbasic in like the early-mid 00s.
If I had to give an introduction to programming to someone with absolutely no prior knowledge, I might still use QBasic (or rather something like QB64 or an online interpreter) for it. The simplicity of the syntax and no required boilerplate for getting started really lends itself to it.
Author claims the computer had Windows 98 on it so I would assume it is second hand since you couldn't buy a new computer with W98 on it in 2008 either. Or as you say a typo or mistake.
Until 2012 I was using an old laptop, Celeron with 760mb RAM, running Lubuntu and Windows XP. It was very crappy, but allowed me to do some web freelancing (thanks Sublime Text, I miss you) and browse web in general (sure, one thing at a time. Sometimes I couldn't listen to music on Banshee and have a heavy RAM tab opened). That's what I could afford at the time. Today I got a powerful Dell laptop, don't care anymore about these micro optimizations. I feel like I'm betraying my old self, hah.