Spectravideo CompuMate It was a cartridge and keyboard combo for the Atari 2600 which ran MS Basic. It had a music composer and a simple graphics program as well as the fact that you could program stuff in basic. I got it in 1983. I had played with computers before, mainly things like the Apple II, Commodore 16 and 64 and a few IBM XT machines but it wasn't until 1985 that I got my own proper IBM XT compatible PC.
That thing had a 4 CGA 'colour' adapter, green monochrome screen, twin 5.25" floppy discs and a grand total of 640KB of RAM. It came with MS DOS 3.0. Sometime in 1987 I got a Soundblaster card and I remember completing Prince of Persia on the same machine in 1989 being amazed at all the sampled sound effects and Adlib FM music which the game had. I also remember hoping that Jordan Mechner would redo Karateka in a similar fashion to Prince of Persia. I played a ton of games on that old PC, including Double Dragon, Microprose Gunship, F15 Strike Eagle, Stealth (the original and the Lockheed approved 2.0 version), MS Flightsim, Leaderboard Golf (complete with its Caddy Shack reference), every Sierra game I could get and a ton more. In 1991 I purchased a 386/25 machine with a Tseng ET4000 VGA adapter and 20MB Hard Drive (I brought the Sound Blaster across) and I was amazed at how fast the new machine was. I think replayed all my games at least twice over, marvelling at the EGA/VGA graphics and the smoothness of the animations. "
And to think, 20 years from now even the fastest computers of today will look as outdated as that one does to us now.
When I was 11 I got bought a PC that could manage games. That would be over 7 years ago now. It had 256MB RAM and an NVidia 5200... I don't remember the processor. It was great, the games I remember playing that stand out are Star Wars: Republic Commando, NFS Underground, Simpsons: Hit and Run and Fable. Good times.
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