We were so poor that ...

The release candidate of the next  version of Microsoft Windows, called Windows 7, is now available for evaluation. You'll be able to install and run it for about year without purchasing an upgrade license. Starting in March of next year, the early release version of Windows 7 will shift into nag mode, meaning that it will put up warning messages to remind you to purchase a license. It will also start to reboot, automatically and without warning, a rather annoying feature if you're trying to get real work done.  Of course, you shouldn't be trying to do real work with evaluation software.
A dozen or so years ago, I worked for a start-up computer company (long since unstarted-up). We had very little money, in part because we used precious cash to open an office in Japan, do a major trade show in Germany, and maintain an office in San Diego whle our headquarters were in Massachusetts. (We had some very smart people in the San Diego office, including the VP of engineering, who was my boss for the first year.)
The misguided expenditures left us with precious little cash for our regular operations. We got by as best we could.

• We had an evaluation version of Windows NT 4 running on our server. As with Windows 7, the NT server started rebooting at random intervals after the evaluation period expired. We worked around it until a licensed copy came our way.
  
• Our external server was a reliable little box running BSD (a free UNIX system package). Our network connection to the outside world, however, was first an oddball dialup connection to some other company. Later, we got our own direct connection, a 56K modem that was shared by the 30 or so people in the office. 
• We used whatever software we could find. Our chief financial officer said that it was cheaper to pay the fines for using unlicensed software than to pay for the software itself. (Those rules have since changed, makng the penalties much steeper for pirated software.)
  So, we'd have one licensed copy of most programs and everyone would use them. Where evaluation copies were available, such as FrameMaker that we used for our manuals, well, even better. 
• Our CFO was able to get evaluation units of photocopiers. We try them out for a month or two and then return them, saying that we needed this feature or that feature. We'd then get another eval unit or another brand from another supplier.
  

The company's product was a network file server, primarily for MacIntosh systems. It had 100GB of storage and sold for $100,000 in 1996-98. I recently saw a special deal for a 1TB (10 times the size of our server) for $79.