TL;DR It was an old Wang system, 286 processor(I think, anyway), with no hard drive, a 5.25" floppy drive, and a lovely green monochrome monitor. I didn’t have it long enough to reach the point where I could have identified the actual hardware/specs.
Back in 1993, I was 10, and the internet really wasn’t a thing yet(yeah, yeah, I know. But for most of us, the internet didn’t exist until the mid-late 90’s). You’d probably have difficulty even finding someone in the neighborhood who could tell you what a computer was, nevermind having used one. I was out running around the city, as you used to be able to do at 10 years old, when I passed by some local business/office/who knows I was 10. Big pile of trash out front, waiting to be picked up. When you’re a kid, and you’re poor, you go picking. Trash picking, I mean. You can get all sorts of cool shit, especially from the wealthier neighborhoods. Maybe it’s different nowadays, but back in the day, people would toss out perfectly good toys, bikes, electronics, furniture, and as they became more commom, videogames, computers, etc. A ton of the shit I owned as a kid is stuff I picked straight out of the trash. Even after that, I picked trash for years. Resold a metric FUCKTON of stuff that other(presumably wealthier) people deemed to be garbage.
Back to this business/office/free stuff location, I obviously start eyeing what’s in the big pile out front of this place. Among the stuff, I see a big, beige, metal box, a weird looking TV, and something with a big coiled wire hanging off of it. Now, it’s not like there weren’t computers in movies/TV at that point, and I had just read Jurassic park the same year, so I did recognize, vaguely, what it was. So I start looking at it, poking around, It had a name on it. “Wang”. Don’t know what that means, but I’m 10; that’s hilarious. I decide I’m taking it. Tried to pick it up, and yeah, that shit is heavy. Nevermind the TV thing, and the keyboard. So as you do, I look around for a stary shopping cart, and sure enough, there’s never one far away. Grab the cart and start lifting my haul into it, when someone comes out of the business/office/treasure-hoard, and yells “HEY!” Thought I was about to be in trouble, but instead, this guys walks over to me and says “you’re gonna need this.” Handed me a bundle of wires, and a square envelope, and just went back inside. So I toss that in the cart, and start pushing. And push I did. A shopping cart full of early 90’s computer hardware, pushed by a 10 year-old, down the street, on and off of curb, up and down hills, from the other end of the city, is hard work. But eventually, I got home with it. Not to worry though, I only lived on the 3rd floor of a three-story building.
So I get home, and I start unloading my haul, one piece at a time, and start dragging it up the stairs. Thankfully no one was home, so I could bring everything into my room without anyone complaing about what I’m doing. That was also one of the only times I actually had a bedroom, so that worked out. Once I get it in there, I put the big metal box on the floor in the corner of my room, I take my monitor and decide that I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to sit on top, so I put that there. The keyboard was next. After I untagled that cursed coiled cable, I obviously checked the back of the monitor, looking for where I need to plug the keyboard in. Figured out that no, it gets plugged into the big metal box. What next? Oh, right, that bundle of wires the guy gave me. It tuned out to be a couple of power cables, and a (what I now would assume) was a VGA cable. So I get to work plugging all of that in, and when it comes to the VGA cable, that’s when I realize that oh, everything plugs into the metal box, that seems important. That must be the part that is a “computer.” So what the hell is the TV thing? Took a minute, but I eventually remembered my NES, and realized that oh yeah, the box is where everything happens, and the screen is just where you see it. Again, I was 10, and all of this technology was still new to the average person. Give me a break here.
And last up was that square envelope. Would you believe it had a blackplastic inside? It’s really floppy. Weird. What the fuck is this thing? It has a white sticker on it, and some illegible scribbles. Nintendo to the rescue again. This black plastic thing sure does look like it would fit into the slot on the front of the metal box. Oh shit, it did! Now I just have to turn this thing on. How the fuck do you turn this thing on? Spent a while on that one, flipping the obvious big red power switch in the back. Took a while before I figured out there was a second power button on the front. TWO**** power switches?! What is this nonsense? Whatever. It’s on now.
I sat and watched as bright green text started popping up on the screen. Various numbers, and phrases that I’d never heard in my life. Clearly, this stuff could only be understood some secret government agent, or that one kid I read about Jurassic Park, who was obviously like, a genius hacker or something. The slot where I shoved that floppy plastic square sure is noisy. What the hell is it doing, anyway? It loads in kust like my Nintendo games, maybe it’s a game?! Maybe a game is about to start. It sure was, friends. Maybe the greatest game ever made. We called it… DOS.
Man, did I love that game, DOS. I spent the several hours, typing random shit on the keyboard, as the command prompt did absolutely nothing of interest, since I had no idea what I was doing. But after those couple of hours of typing swears and random nonsense, I finally started to get bored, what with all of the nothing that was happening. And for whatever reason, I thought maybe someone could help me. Or, why not the computer itself? Maybe it will help me. So I typed the work “help”, I hit the enter key, and sure enough, something finally happened. Holy shit, it’s doing something. It’s telling me how to DO stuff.
And so, before this novel goes on even longer, yeah. I found the help menu, and spent many more hours needlessly using very basic commands to create, copy, move, rename, and delete empty files and folders. Truly, I was now an elite haxxor man.
Over the next couple of years, I pulled many systems and parts out of various trash piles, and cobbled together different systems. Many, many different 386 and 486 systems. Until finally, when I was 15, I managed to get my hands on an obscenely slow, but absolute magic at the time, dialup modem, and a pile of “free hours” of AOL.
And they all lived happily ever after… Until social media was invented. The end.
If people like/want to read/discuss such poorly written nonsense, maybe I’ll write up some nonsense about other technology-based shenanigans from over the years. And if people would rather make fun of my poor writing skills; fair.
Mine was the only legit Apple clone.
A Laser 128, a legit clone of the iic.
I was in late middle school/early high school (can’t remember exactly when we got it). My family had a dj business, and in addition to learning BASIC, I put the entire DJ music catalog into an AppleWorks database, played a TON of zork and Bard’s Tale, and attempted to write my own text adventure game in BASIC that was loosely based on Piers Anthony’s world of Xanth. (I read a ton of Piers Anthony as a kid. In hindsight, ick.)
I read a ton of Piers Anthony as a kid. In hindsight, ick.
I read a few of those books at some point. Do I dare look up the Wikipedia page?
I wouldn’t recommend it. He’s pretty gross.
My introduction to the world of computers was back in the late 80s when my stepdad brought home a Pravetz 8D. It was an 8-bit Oric clone made in Bulgaria. It hooked up to our TV and we had a cassette deck to load/save data. I was 13 or 14 at the time living in Ukraine. Playing games and learning BASIC on it got me interested in coding and started me on the path to a now 30+ year career in IT. Technically it wasn’t mine though.
After we emigrated to the USA in the early 90s I went to college to continue studying programming. With my very first paycheck from a part-time job I bought my very own first PC. It was a 486DX2-66 with a ginormous 40 megabyte hard drive.
I got an emachines tower and a bunch of secondhand peripherials. I was thrilled to have my own computer at the time, but in hindsight it didnt really meet any of the system requirements of the games i wanted to play. I remember getting a smooth as gravel 3 fps in Ironforge. Miserable, but i didnt really know any better
Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I. I first saw one in school, and while the rest of the kids took a turn playing a snake game, I read the instruction card. Hit break, read the program, decided I could do that. Took a summer class (for adults, I was the only kid). Got my own. Programmed a lot. Despite (because of) the limited graphics: 64x16 chars, or 128x48 B&W pixel graphics, there were a lot of games on it, very low barrier to writing your own.
Couple years later got an Atari 800, which is still my favorite computer of all time, and I make retro games or demos for it.
A friend of the family built it for us. I think it was ‘96 or so. I was maybe 13 or 14. I had used computers a little at school and at friends’ houses.
It was a pc clone that ran win95. Cyrix p166 cpu (which actually ran at 133 mhz), 16 mb of EDO RAM, 800ish MB hard drive, a 4x cd rom drive and a 33.6k modem. I loved that thing and learned everything I could about how it worked.
We didn’t have internet access at first, so I started dialing in to local BBSs. I eventually found a local board running wildcat that shared it’s ISDN internet connection to users. And I would download pornographic images and save them to floppy disks to sell at my all boys catholic high school.
A PC running MS-DOS, 133 MHz. Mostly some text writing and a few games. It was my father computer.
In the 2010s my family had a HP Compaq SFF with Windows 7.
TRS-80 Color Computer with 4K of memory. (1982)
First one I remember was the Commodore 64.
We used to type programs into it from my Dad’s books just so we’d have more games to play on it. When it didn’t run, my brother and I would have to check the code again line-by-line.
Also, we didn’t know how to write to disk, so if someone powered it off that game was gone.
I had to write to normal cassette tape.
My mom needed a computer for her job. Gateway with Window 95 on it. It ran Tomb Raider at like 5fps and I played the shit out of it.
Mine was a Leading Edge Model D and 8088 PC with 512k of RAM. It was the more expensive model that had a little metal switch on the back that could turn on EGA graphics. My family got it 3rd hand when I was 8 or 9. I mostly used it for making greeting cards and banners (on the tractor feed dot matrix printer) and copying basic programs out of Byte magazine.
eMac, age 7. i concerned myself primarily with clarisworks, making nested folders, and age of empires 2. my siblings and i argued about strategy in age of empires 2 a lot. i think i am the worst rts player of all time.
i was very good at deimos rising and otto matic and was the only one of us who could beat them
My first computer was a brand new Commodore Amiga 600 that I got for Christmas in 1992. I was 10. It was glorious. It had 1MB of RAM with a built-in floppy drive (and no hard drive) and was paired with a lovely 14" CRT monitor at a time when most non-PC home computers were connected to TVs with RF modulators. The difference in image quality was immediately apparent when I went to my friends’ houses and played on their Amigas.
My parents were convinced because you could do educational-type stuff on it, but really it was a games machine with a keyboard for me - we never had dedicated games consoles. I played the hell out of it for a few years until we got our first Windows 95 PC around 1996.
Mine was a MC-10 with a tape drive. We ended up getting a 16K expansion module for it and it was great. Then got a TRS-80 and then a Tandy 1000. Oh those were the days. $800 for a 10MB hard drive module for the Tandy! My dad always made backups of the hard drive on floppy disk because he thought the hard disk was going to stop working if we lost power. Took a while to convince him that it won’t lose the stuff on the drive . I unplugged the computer and he lost his mind that we lost everything and yelled. Plugged it in and turned it back on and all the data was there. Never apologized but at least I was right. Lol
Back in the day, people(old people lol) were willing to pay you to make a custom screensaver with pictures of their grandkids, their cat, and that one time they did that obviously hilarious thing in that one picture. Whip up a quick screensaver, stop by their house, copy it over and set it as the screensaver in Windows, here’s $20. Well, I used my grandmother’s desktop one time to make a quick one, because she asked me to for one of her family members, and when I popped a disk in to make a copy, she asked me what I was doing. I explained I was copying the file to give it to the person in question, and she proceeded to have a meltdown, throwing a fit about how I was “taking something out of her computer” and how “it wasn’t [my] computer” and I had no right to “sell things out of it.” As you can imagine, I was wasting my time when I tried to explain that copying a file was not removing something from her computer. She spent a good 45 minutes on her tantrum, and never did change her mind. The other person did get thier screensaver, though. So I guess she just continued to believed that I literally ripped a piece of hardware out of her computer and gave it away.
The first computer I used was (I think) a CP/M system that could run BASIC, and I used to use it to play Castle in the early '90s.
The first computer of my own was a Gateway laptop for college in 2002. It was the first Wi-Fi device I laid hands on. I immediately set it up to play music to wake me up in the morning, and I listened to the fans running all night.
