TOD, cont'd.
A year or so after I'd been dabbling in the Commodore world, our company began using PCs. I don't remember if there was a particular brand, but it wasn't IBM or Compaq. I believe they were 286's with two floppies and a (gasp) 20MB hard drive, and in those days it definitely behooved one to learn the basics of installing software, etc. From there they went to 386 and 486 machines.
When our first Costco opened in 1993, I decided I couldn't resist getting my first ever PC for home, and that was a Packard Bell 386, with a VCA color monitor, my first of those. Monitor was definitely lower-res than it should have been, but I was happy with it for a while.
From there, I had one or two other PCs "custom"-built by those stores that popped up in shopping centers and strip malls. They were good value for the money in comparison with the name brands, for sure, but I eventually moved into a Gateway, which by then might have been running Windows 95 and then 98. The housemates went for Dell, which seemed good. That lasted quite a while, and when it began nearing its end of life, I went to laptops, the first of which was a huge, very heavy HP. Then there was a Toshiba, and the old one I still have is an HP that's a dozen or more years old and is still cautiously running Windows 7 (I run Malwarebytes on it to be safe, but I also keep it offline except for brief moments).
