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I was 8 years old in 1983 when my parents bought the original IBM PC model 5150. It had 64k of RAM, two 5¼" floppy drives, and a CGA video card. By the end of i

I was 8 years old in 1983 when my parents bought the original IBM PC model 5150. It had 64k of RAM, two 5¼" floppy drives, and a CGA video card. By the end of its life, it had 576k of RAM, a VGA video card, and 2 20MB MFM hard drives. Oh, and an NEC V20 CPU in place of the original 8088. I took a BASIC programming course at Radio Shack on the TRS-80 and was otherwise self-taught (sometimes learning /with/ my dad) until university. (I took computer science in high school, too, but didn't learn anything new :) ) Also extremely grateful for these events!

herodoturtle 6y ago
I love that you remember all the technical details too :-) Our PC was an i486DX2-66. It had 1Mb of SIMM memory which I soon upgraded to EDO (purely to run better games!). It also had a 400Mb hard drive which hamstrung me - and so out of desperation I took to running DBLSPACE - which if I recall correctly was buggy and rendered the system useless. I was too scared to tell my folks that I'd "broken" our PC (they had no idea as they never used it themselves). But the sleepless nights of me trying to solve the issue was also quite formative in my learning experience. From programming in BASIC I soon moved on to graphics programming in C - mostly thanks to tuts that I found on BBS forums (shout-out to Denthor if he ever reads this). And from there the inevitable university degree in Computer Science and the career path that followed :-)