Old Beginnings
--------------

Windows 3.1... ah sounds of dial-up, clacky keyboards (and
sometimes even clackier hard drives!), 3.5" floppy
diskettes, and CD-ROMS.

It was 1994 when we got our first home computer. An Acer
Acros PT66DB desktop. My memory of that machine is a little
poor. I believe it had something like a 400MB hard drive,
16MB of RAM, and I'm pretty sure it had an Intel 486DX2
processor. It came preinstalled with MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows
3.1.

I was only in 3rd, maybe 4th grade when we got this PC.
Initially I think it was pretty boring. It had some basic
games, such as Solitaire (of course), but little else for a
kid to be interested in. However, one day I was at a friends
house and he had Sim City 2000 installed. Oh man, I was hooked.
I was able to get the disks from them and install it on my own
PC.

Thus began my love affair with computers.

Windows 3.1
-----------

I think I have a particular affinity for Windows 3.1 just due
to its simplicity and how I grew up with it. Technologically
speaking, it was the first Windows operating system that
garnered wide acclaim. It sported many improvements over
Windows 3.0, such as TTF (True-Type Fonts), better stability,
screensavers, drag-and-drop, and a whole host of other features
that are still in Windows to this day.

Fast-forward to Today
---------------------

I currently have sitting on my desk that same model of Acer
Acros 486 I had back in the 90s. I thought it a fitting machine
to get back into retro computers and programming. Especially
since I was the one who broke our original one... heh :) I
figured the least I could do is save one of its bretheren from
the scrap heap and get it back in working order as an homage
to the original machine that got me into technology to begin
with.

In this article I plan to write about how I set up this machine,
as well as how I got it on the "modern internet" (don't get too
excited, it still can't browse the modern internet properly,
persay.)