>an Acer 486 with 40MB drive and 32MB RAM.

32MB ram <-- no way. 4 and 8MB were the standard (8MB being grand), you could find 16MB on some Pentiums. So 40MB drive and 32MB RAM is an exceptionally unlikely combo.

32MB become norm around Pentium MMX and K6(-2).

Haha, I wondered if someone would complain about 32MB. We had the board maxed out. My grandfather’s computer before ours.

A few months after taking possession, I upgraded the disk to a luxurious 400MB.

The classic NAND-me-down. My first personal computer was a "broken" 486 system I got for $25 at a yard sale. All it needed was a hard drive.

We had a 386 DX with 32MB of RAM. I don’t think it was that uncommon. DOOM still didn’t run super smoothly, though.

Nah, as the other poster said 4 or 8 MB was what was common on 486 machines. Even less on 386. Most 386 motherboards didn't even support more than 16MB.

It could have been bought old and upgraded. Not everyone had the luxury of a brand new first computer.

Possibly, but even mother boards supporting 32MB would be rare. Perhaps on "DX3"?

As for a new computer and price - it was like $1000 to get AMD 486DX2-80 with 4MB RAM in '95...

So this depends if it was a 72 pin DIMM board. I don't think you could get there (easily?) on a 30 pin board, but 72 may have had native support for 64 out of the box.

I upgraded a ~1992 Dell 486 DX2 to 36MB (original 4MB + 32MB...or was it a pair of 16MB sticks? hard to remember) around 1997 or so.

Yeah, IIRC my first computer, or at least the first one I really maintained, was a Pentium 2 with 32MB of ram and a 2gb hard drive. Good ole gateway pcs.

The first first computer I had was an old IBM PC.

TigerDirect? Wow. How did I forget the first place I used and instantly maxxed a credit card? I would look through that catalog right now if I had it.

Internet Archive has three:

https://archive.org/details/tiger-direct-pc-price-blitz-cata...

https://archive.org/details/tigerdirect-v15i5a

https://archive.org/details/tiger-direct-web-safe