Being 80 wouldn’t explain it. My 80+ aunt with severe arthritis (as in having had multiple surgeries on her feet and hands) managed two stairs up and down several times a day with no complaints. She considered it good excercise and saw it as one thing that keept her on her feet.
Exactly how much groceries do people have? I currently live two stairs up from the ground floor as I have lived for more than 15 years. It has honestly never even crossed my mind that carrying up groceries could ever be a problem.
Are you sure you remember it right? The time of 386 was years and years before Windows 98 or even 95. More likely it will have been running something like DOS+Windows 3.0/3.1(1) maybe? At least that’s what my 386 was running. 95/98 were Pentium era operating systems.
Probably semen, though.