The 386 was released shortly before I bought my first computer as a teen. At the time, I saw both 286 and 386 PC's on the market, but the latter with a large pr

The 386 was released shortly before I bought my first computer as a teen. At the time, I saw both 286 and 386 PC's on the market, but the latter with a large price premium. I wasn't sure what the difference was at the time, so I bought the 286 system. Within a couple of years I had learned the difference and had large regret I didn't save my money and buy a 386. Shortly after that, I started writing low level assembler including the system bootstrap for a toy OS, which now could not use 32-bit protected mode. In addition, 386-only games started to be released at some point, and so I very much felt left out until I bought my first 486, but that wasn't until years later.