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That's about the right time frame. Most 286s were coming stock with 512-640k, or you could pay a LOT more to bump it up to 1mb. A 20mb HD was somewhat "standard". They could squeeze 10 more mb out of it by using RLL encoding for not much more money (relatively speaking), but they were less reliable. The higher end HDs were 40mb, and were the limit for most personal computers. You could get an 80mb, but they were very expensive and only businesses that needed that much storage were buying them.
In about 1990, the company I was working for (a computer retailer) replaced their IBM System 36 with a 25MHz 386 with 2mb of RAM and (2) 330mb ESDI drives. PRICEY! I had fun putting that system together, and got my first introduction to any of the *nix flavors (they ran Xenix on it).
According to one site I read, the 286 came out in 1985. The price in the ad still seems high, but another article claimed the Deskpro 386 debuted with a list price of about 5800 pounds, or four times the cost of an IBM PC at the time. It's still hard to believe someone would buy a used computer for that much money, though.
I had a customer in last week, she had just bought a Dell desktop from some online shop for her son to play WOW but after 30 days XP wanted activation (which is fishy because Dell's are preactivated). So she brings it in, it was in fact new... back in September of 2003! She had paid almost $600 for the thing, when better equipped models are going on ebay for 50 bucks.
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Think it serves Frankenberry or Capt Crunch? 
