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> 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
by 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. :)
- xenospn 7y agoMy 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.
- lioeters 7y agoAww, 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 friends around that age all had a wildly popular video game console called Nintendo "Fami-Com". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System 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.