I had the weirdest 286 clone I'm quite nostalgic about - a tiny little thing with a 9" monochrome screen and 40Mb HDD that I learned C on. Whole thing was shrun

I had the weirdest 286 clone I'm quite nostalgic about - a tiny little thing with a 9" monochrome screen and 40Mb HDD that I learned C on. Whole thing was shrunk in the same proportion as the monitor, so it looked like a shrinky-dink version of a standard desktop of the era. The CPU component would have been about 8" wide. I tricked it out with a 28.8k modem so I could get to local BBSes. This "tied an onion to my belt" reminiscence may go to support your theory.