You were living large! My first Linux computer was a 20Mhz 80386SX with a 40MB hard drive partitioned half for Windows 3.0 and half for Linux (SLS) and swap. It had a whopping 4MB of RAM and I also compiled my own kernel making sure to trim down features as much as possible. It was magic seeing X11 come up for the first time just like the big-bucks Sun boxes!
My XT had an 8088 @ ~4mhz in it, and we pushed it uphill to school both ways, in the snow!
It was multi-functional though. The power supply was inefficient enough to heat the room, while simultaneously being heavy enough to bludgeon large creatures for sustenance.
Something inside me misses the radiant heat, sitting here on a cold day with my chilly metallic laptop.
oh kids! i used to crank the wheel by hand on my analytical engine that my hacker friends and me built after there was a leak of babbage's plans! he never knew!
you kids and you petabytes of ram! back in my day....
/s
(i'm looking forward for these comments to be commented on a certain website i'm not supposed to name)
The prime directive of said website is to never name it on hacker news. But I'm pretty sure you can Google the prime directive itself and figure out where it comes from. As a hint, it starts with "ng".
Ran windows 3.1, Civilisation (VGA graphics), railroad tycoon, Star Trek 25th anniversary - and could have them all installed at the same time. Other programs included championship manager 93, and I think day of the tentacle.
I was a kid when my father first acquired a similar computer.
We ran Windows 3.0 and my father configured a boot entry for running Doom or Ultima 7, which required so much memory that it wasn't possible to run Windows, only DOS.
I remember feeling a bit envious about my neighbor having the more powerful 486, which could run Doom much faster than in our PC
Made me laugh about “Dad configured a boot entry”...I remember the hours with my Dad trying to stuff whatever device drivers into that 640K via Autoexec.bat and Config.sys. Got the CD-ROM running but damn if sound now doesn’t work. Those were the days trying to get Tie Fighter in my case to work.
Worse part was my Dad in his wisdom bought a family PC without a Pentium, but a Cyrix P166. Had zero floating point processing. Ran like a damn dog on any 3D game.
Any Brits out there might remember Time Computers. On every back page of any newspaper ever selling PoS computers with whatever subpar hardware they could cram into a big beige box ;-)
Not to brag but I got a 4.77MHz 8086 XT PC for my 8th birthday :) It had a whopping 256KB of RAM, a monochrome display (later upgraded to a 4 color CGA that blew my mind), and two (yes, TWO) Floppy drives.
My dad got one of those for us both to use...what was truly "whopping" about it was its price...
If I remember right it was almost $3k...but that included that blazing fast 300bps Hayes modem for wide-area networking.
And my mind was truly blown when we replaced the 2nd floppy with a more-memory-then-we-will-EVER-need 20MB hard drive...what could we do with all those bits??
And a decade before, the distributor DigiKey presented as a one-column advertisement in Popular Electronics, selling 7400 DIP ICs for $0.29 . Inflation-adjusted, that $0.29 now buys a an IC that can run Linux.
Wow, I admire the far-sightedness of your parents, to give a child a computer at such a young age (and in those early days of PCs).
I was of a similar age when my dad brought home an NEC PC 9801 - with an 8086 CPU (8MHz), 640KB RAM, kanji (~3000 characters) font ROM, even a Japanese word processor. I think it ran MS-DOS 2~3.
"In 1987, NEC announced one million PC-98s were shipped."
That was a big wave, and I'm so glad my parents let me play with a computer as a "toy" - it was a huge influence on my mental development.
Kinda like the monolith moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey. :)
My parents had no idea, and they couldn't afford it anyway :) My dad asked his cousin, who happened to be working with PCs way, way back and recommended he get a PC instead of a C64 which is what everyone else had. My dad asked his dad and my grandfather forked over what must have been an insane amount back in 1980's Israel.
Aww, that's so nice that your dad asked around and pulled resources together for you. And I'm sure grandfather knew it was a worthy investment in your future.
My parents refused to buy it, and instead let me play with the PC-98, where I learned BASIC, Turbo Pascal, even some 8086 assembly language.
I suppose if I have children, I'd discourage mobile phones/apps and instead give them Raspberry Pi, microcomputers, sensors, devices they can build stuff with.
This time of year is ripe for nostalgia. I recall that it was just about this time in 1993 during Christmas break that I loaded Linux version 0.96(?) onto this 386SX machine. This involved taking a stack of 1.44MB floppies and driving to a place where I had access to the internet. I'd choose SLS packages and copy each to an individual floppy. Then I'd drive home and load them one by one until I had a bootable system. And of course with floppies, it was inevitable that you'd get a error now and then. So, back to the car, download, copy and repeat. All to get away from the limitations of Windows 3.0...
Talking about Christmas, we used to go to my aunt's on Christmas day and I remember the time they bought an Amiga for my cousins. We were very young so between games we used to have a good laugh with the program that did text-to-speech (can't remember the name right now), but it only spoke English and we were easily amused by typing phrases in Italian and having them read back as if it was English (so the pronunciation was all messed up).
same here, packard bell but iirc it was 20/40Mhz with 40MHz being the turbo, but before that I did have a zenith 8088 dual 5.25" floppy system that had to boot dos with one disk and run programs off the other (mostly written in gwbasic).
