I went from a 6809-based Color Computer 3 circa 1987 to a 80286. I am kicking myself today because my Uncle Bob told me the job that paid me $1,200 to get a new machine created upwards of $60,000 of value so I could have asked for enough to get a 386!

I was told not to waste any time with 80286 protected mode by all the experts I talked to. I can't complain a lot because that 80286 was crazy fast. Fast enough that when I got another job to develop some software for a teacher at my school I was able to run a Z80 emulator to develop for CP/M and get performance several times better than any real Z80!

I loved programming it too, the 286 had some 16-bit data paths that the 8086 didn't have which I took advantage of in assembly and in copy/move/zero routines that I used with Turbo Pascal which I thought was a much nicer language to C but when I got to college I switched to C because it was portable to the Sun 68k and later SPARC machines we had.