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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

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!

tarruda 7y ago
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
- shakermakr 7y ago
  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 ;-)
GordonS 7y ago
Hah, you had it great! My first PC was a 286, which IIRC either had no HDD, OR. 20MB HDD (might be mixing it with our next PC, which was a 386). I'm pushing 40, and still shake my head in wonder sometimes about just how much is possible at such small scale and cost. But this is now turning into "when I were a lad..." :)
- serf 7y ago
  Oh, you kids! 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.
  - yantrams 7y ago
    I honestly thought you were gonna reference the Four Yorkshiremen sketch by Monty Python after the second line!
    - mattl 7y ago
      Predates Python by a couple years. It’s from “At Last The 1948 Show” from the 60s.
      - yantrams 7y ago
        Didn't know that. Thanks for sharing.
  - hirundo 7y ago
    My Heathkit H89 had a Z80, 16K of RAM and a built in cassette interface. And we liked it.
    - cubano 7y ago
      I just flipped a bank of 16 switches by hand with vacuum tube gates and core memory...punch cards are for sissies!
      - Filligree 7y ago
        You had a computer? Back then I wrote C programs on paper, then executed them by hand...
xenospn 7y ago
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.
- a9h74j 7y ago
  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.
- cubano 7y ago
  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??
  - xenospn 7y ago
    Same! We got 640kb of ram and a mouse! The HDD didn’t arrive until we got a 286, tho.
  - nonamenoslogan 7y ago
    Yeah the prices were crazy! My first was a 10Mhz AMD 286 clone with 1mb and a 40mb HDD. I recall it being $2600 with a 13” SVGA monitor.
- lioeters 7y ago
  > 8086 XT PC for my 8th birthday 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. :)
jbuzbee 7y ago
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...
- klez 7y ago
  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).
ridiculous_fish 7y ago
Mine was a Mac IIsi - 20MHz 68030, 1MB RAM. To run Linux, you needed to install a daughtercard with a hardware FPU.
sabujp 7y ago
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).

tarruda 7y ago

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

shakermakr 7y ago
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 ;-)

GordonS 7y ago

Hah, you had it great! My first PC was a 286, which IIRC either had no HDD, OR. 20MB HDD (might be mixing it with our next PC, which was a 386). I'm pushing 40, and still shake my head in wonder sometimes about just how much is possible at such small scale and cost. But this is now turning into "when I were a lad..." :)

serf 7y ago
Oh, you kids! 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.
- yantrams 7y ago
  I honestly thought you were gonna reference the Four Yorkshiremen sketch by Monty Python after the second line!
  - mattl 7y ago
    Predates Python by a couple years. It’s from “At Last The 1948 Show” from the 60s.
    - yantrams 7y ago
      Didn't know that. Thanks for sharing.
- hirundo 7y ago
  My Heathkit H89 had a Z80, 16K of RAM and a built in cassette interface. And we liked it.
  - cubano 7y ago
    I just flipped a bank of 16 switches by hand with vacuum tube gates and core memory...punch cards are for sissies!
    - Filligree 7y ago
      You had a computer? Back then I wrote C programs on paper, then executed them by hand...

xenospn 7y ago

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.

a9h74j 7y ago
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.
cubano 7y ago
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??
- xenospn 7y ago
  Same! We got 640kb of ram and a mouse! The HDD didn’t arrive until we got a 286, tho.
- nonamenoslogan 7y ago
  Yeah the prices were crazy! My first was a 10Mhz AMD 286 clone with 1mb and a 40mb HDD. I recall it being $2600 with a 13” SVGA monitor.
lioeters 7y ago
> 8086 XT PC for my 8th birthday 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. :)

jbuzbee 7y ago

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...

klez 7y ago
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).

ridiculous_fish 7y ago

Mine was a Mac IIsi - 20MHz 68030, 1MB RAM. To run Linux, you needed to install a daughtercard with a hardware FPU.

sabujp 7y ago

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).