Man this takes me back. We had an Atari ST when we were kids, but it overlapped heavily with the 386 era. But my earliest "what is a computer?" exploration was

Man this takes me back. We had an Atari ST when we were kids, but it overlapped heavily with the 386 era. But my earliest "what is a computer?" exploration was entirely built around what that machine did when you booted it without a game disk in (and thus got into GEM). Inspired a feeling I later got when I discovered my grade 5 classroom had an old 286 with Windows 1.0 on it and a really early DOS - just the joy of messing around with old systems.