Man, the 386 was such a huge leap. I went to college with an 80286 in 1988. It was a splurge, but I had saved money and a full ride to school, so it was a futu

Man, the 386 was such a huge leap. I went to college with an 80286 in 1988. It was a splurge, but I had saved money and a full ride to school, so it was a future-proofing thing. I enjoyed a couple years of absolute hardware superiority in my dorm, which was fun, but by 1991 it was time to upgrade. I bought a 33Mhz Gateway 2000 80386, and HOLY CRAP the speed boost was amazing. People love to run this-or-that task on a new machine to bask in the speed, but the jump over the 286 here was so huge that just running "dir" on a directory with lots of files was entertaining. It was ridiculously fast; we giggled. No word of it a lie, that jump was the single most shocking and amazing upgrade of my computing life; nothing later came close until the point about a decade ago when I swapped out the spinning drive in my Macbook Pro for an SSD.