Here’s a scan of the specs of a computer that I bought in 1989. At this time, I was a Junior Electrical Engineering major at A&M. We had VAX accounts at school that we used to run SPICE models and email. In the few CS classes that I took, we had UNIX accounts. The 386SX was used for remote access via A&M’s dial-up (terminal), word processing, and Quatro-Pro for some lab results.

Look at how much it cost me!!!!

A few years later, I bought a 486DX-33 computer. I was still at A&M but working on a Master of Science degree. I used it and turbo C++ and gcc based compiler on DOS to run simulations of Speech CODECs and packet loss recovery techniques. I also ran Latex on it to write my thesis.