I remember trying to get Doom to run on a 386. That wasn't a fun experience and that evening spent with the monitor perched on a coffee table, a Post-It sized window with ChunkyVision graphics, me in a quite severely pre-hungover state with the main lights still on and some weird Frank Zappa CD playing combined into quite a surreal experience. Not the good sort.
My salary was bad enough and my mortgage big enough that I couldn't afford a PC so I had to use whatever I could beg, borrow or steal from work, and neither Philips nor DEC were really very PC oriented. I did have a Vax in the spare bedroom which dealt with my email (DEC installed a leased line for me: a KiloStream sounds pedestrian by today's standards at 64 Kbit but that was way faster than anyone's modem at a time when 9600 was still rare) which, in spite of being just a little one, really nommed my electricity greedily resulting in large electricity bills before that was really a thing and getting very hot over summer as the boiler was in there too (it lived in the airing cupboard: small terraced house with a tiny kitchen and it had to go somewhere). Still, in spite of melting it was worth it to have a commute that just involved staggering across my landing.
What was interesting is that even then (this would've been 1995) working at home was not a new concept and I got the leased line because it'd already been extensively studied and made workable years previously, and saved money for both the employer and employee, and resulted in the employee getting less stressed and the employer getting more productivity and better quality. Ever since I moved on a couple of years later I've never been able to find anyone willing to allow home-working and it's been like that pretty much everywhere. It's taken this lockdown 25 years later for anything to happen and the unwillingness and foot-dragging are still a sight to behold, usually supported by the same old excuses, "but employees can't be trusted to work", which was not only debunked at least 30 years ago (employees are more likely to overwork), it says a lot about what is wrong with UK managers. I've actually spent a lot of time working out what managers actually do, especially once you factor in timesheets since that's the absolute basic: they should know what their staff are doing and timesheets should only be necessary for contractors. Then I spent nearly a year with no manager after he flounced off in a strop due to one of us being paid almost as much and... nothing bad happened. Whereas lots of good things happened: allowed to manage ourselves, productivity and morale both soared and problems and miscommunication with other parts of the organisation became a thing of the past.
Until some higher-up eventually decided we should have a manager, offered me the job (thinking back to the one good manager I had, a former techie who now hated his job, I told them to piss off because I wanted to actually do my job and not faff about dealing with time-wasters) so they recruited someone. He was the manager from hell. Accomplished nothing, blew the entire budget on pointless vanity projects, hired all his cronies from elsewhere and obstructed any actual work being done. Which I think sums up managers perfectly.
