[nileshk]

I was around 8 or 9 when my family got an IBM PCjr. We got it for only $400 because we had a friend who worked for IBM and got discounts and it was already an older machine at that point (around 86 or 87). We never upgraded past the 128K of RAM it came with which limited what apps and games I could run on it. I spent most of my time on it writing in BASIC (which came on a cartridge, which meant I had a good portion of the 128K to work with) and later making attempts to learn C and assembly using some freeware compilers.

The PCjr must've had a bit of a following, because I used to get this catalog with all kinds of interesting upgrades for it that were intended to breath new life into it, long after it was obsolete. They had things like hard drives and replacement CPUs that were twice the clock speed.

Around age 13, I finally got a 1200 baud modem for it that I could only successfully run at 300 baud. But we finally got our next machine shortly after that: a 486/33 w/ 4MB RAM and a 2400 baud modem which blew the PCjr out of the water. The 4MB of RAM was a limitation when I tried to install Linux on it.

It seems I was short on RAM for most of my childhood. Though when my parents bought me my own computer right before I went off to college, I finally could breath a sigh of relief because I actually had enough RAM to run the things I wanted - it was a Pentium 1 with a whopping 16MB of RAM. Linux ran beautifully on it and I was pretty happy with it (as long as I didn't boot into Win95 on it, that is).