Comment by mikestorrent

> In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me.

True for many, many of us, I suspect. My family bought a 286 in the early 90s and it cost something like $2000 CAD then, which is nearly $4000 now; but salaries were lower then, this would have been something like 5-6% of my single income family's yearly post-tax earnings for the year, and if you think about it as the % of "disposable" income it was probably more like 60% of it for the year.

Obviously it paid off in that it set me on the path for my career, hard to make any other investment as good as that, but who would have known that at the time? I'm glad that there were so many ads positioning computers as being educational and not just game machines; even though in reality I think it was learning about the computer to make the games work that taught me way more than any educational software ever did.