[ErroneousBosh]

It sounds like you may have been using very strange or not-working-properly devices.

No-one really needed to care about partitioning.

[al_borland]

I was using a Thinkpad mostly, which were usually considered some of the best options. Some of the bigger issues may have been 25 years ago, not 20.

I remember spending a lot of time partitioning stuff in those early days, especially if trying to dual boot.

[ErroneousBosh]

Thinkpads are normally pretty okay for that sort of thing although they went through a phase of using really weird WLAN cards.