Went down on that when I was 15 and soon learned that you could extend the 640Kb internal memory to 700Kb, since I was nott using a (4) color monitor, but a hercules monochrome one. That provided RAM drive capabilities, fast loading PCTools and Word Perfect 4.2. (Fast is quite relative here)
The Tulip PC died a few years later, and was not immediately replaced for a new one. It was 1990, no internet, no much use for a PC than pure hobby and interest, still the were very expensive gadgets to buy.
n 1996 I started working for an IT company named Twinsoft, specialised in Non Stop, Fault Tolerant mainframes, mainly used by big financial company's, Banks, Stock Exchanges, really specialised systems for 100% uptime transaction handling. Phone billing, ATM transactions, etc. I never did any significant programming for applications, I was a Senior Systems Engineer, maintaining the system for others to run there applications, non stop.
Working at this company gave me the chance to buy a PC and connect to the Internet via a 33,6 kbbps telephoneline modem. 4 Gb harddrive was expensive then, 330 Mhz single core processor mid/high range.
Internet was fun then, only people online were scientists, diplomats, business men were online, Netscape, via ICQ chat program I've met lots of interesting people.
And windows offcourse was the only option, Apple non existent, only for DTP. Windows 95 was all over and the much more developed NT versions for professional use, even VPN already existed. Later on XP and i started to get to know the register, the place where you can overcome 'selected choices'. Loved Win 7, hated W8, but started to believe again with W10. You must give them credit, it runs, recuperates from hw failures and all kinds of strange things like a champ, but one problem.
Start monitoring your connections and you'll find MS is going the same way nowadays with W10 as Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. With every update, I have to imply new rules and shut that behaviour down. The want to know all, profit from my data without consent. All you use, all you visit, all you do... just to serve you, yeah right!
Wanting more control, I want open source.
Linux Mint project has been a revelation, a graphic environment suitable for the majority of people, something I can recommend to people in my network.
Already looking for some tools I used to have to scan for double files, auto selecting the new data collection (500Gb films, music) to be merged with my own.
Setting up the new system (learning boot\partition requirements..) and starting to work with it again as fast as possible have priority.