in the beginning, there was the 8088

January 15, 2003, 04:27 pm

I still remember the first time I used a computer. I'm pretty sure it was Christmas Eve 1985 at my Uncle John's house. He worked at IBM at the time (I have no idea what he was doing there) and had his own 8088. I remember playing King's Quest (on a monochrome green monitor!) and some cheesy Pac Man ripoff. I'm pretty sure I didn't want to leave.

And then the next day, while opening Christmas presents, my dad asked me to get a pen from the desk downstairs in the basement. When I went down there, there was a computer sitting there! Obviously, I was ecstatic. It was a Leading Edge 8088 with two 5.25" floppy drives, a RGB color monitor, and a Panasonic dot-matrix printer! I could be mistaken, but I believe we ran like Microsoft DOS 2.0 or 3.0 or something.

I was way into that computer and played a handful of games (mostly King's Quest 3: To Heir is Human). Later, my Dad purchased a 300 baud modem, which mostly went unused. Once we dialed up some computer at my dad's employer, but I don't think we could do anything with it. And I used it a little when my friends were getting into BBSs. I guess I lost a lot of interest in it after the home consoles I had (SEGA Master System and Genesis) totally outpaced the weak graphics and PC Speaker sound of the Leading Edge. It wasn't until I was in the seventh grade that I became really interested in computers again. A couple of the kids I ran around with had decent computers. There was Scott with his 486 20MHz and Chris who I remember had a legitimate Sound Blaster 16. Fancy.

Scott had a buncha software, which I coveted, including:

My interest in getting a new computer was almost at its peak when I saw something at Chuck's house that changed my life forever: Doom. id Software's most important software release ever. Chuck's 386 could barely support it; I remember shrinking the screen size down almost as small as a stamp! But I was hooked!

My desire to play Doom was so strong that I purchased the game for forty-five dollars even when I had no computer able to play it (Chuck wouldn't give me a copy). I was content enough to install it on Scott's computer. And play it every minute I was ever over at his house. Haha.

And then one day during the Spring Break of my seventh grade year (1992), my parents made me come home from my friends house (we were playing basketball... what's up with that?). And my dad asked me to get a hilighter from the drafting table we had upstairs. And there wasn't a computer there, but there were a whole buncha cow-spotted boxes from Gateway on the floor.

It was my 486DX2 66 MHz with 8 MB of RAM. And don't forget the 340 MB Western Digital hard drive and Epson inkjet printer.

And I was king of the BBSs. I remember downloading shareware and some pirated software, playing BRE, and chatting. Crazy. Of course, all that was over the 9600 baud modem that came with the Gateway. And then I got a 14.4 modem for my birthday and that kicked ass. I think for Christmas I got a 33.6... I can't remember.

To be continued...