[pan69]

The first PC we had in our home was an Olivetti M24, an 8086 running at 8Mhz. This was around 1987 (I think). Then I got my own 286 (also Olivetti) so naturally I have an affinity with early PC's.

In the past two years I rebuild, from parts I sourced in various places, a fully working; 286/16, 386SX/20, 386DX/40, 486DX/100. I also have the parts for a Pentium 100 except for the CPU.

It was fun collecting and sourcing the parts and building the machines up. In my opinion the PC industry in the 90's was most interesting, not because it was "my" time but because technology was advancing leaps and bounds during that period.

[juangacovas]

Same here about Olivetti. In case you didn't know, last year I learnt about PCem, an emulator to bring back to life those XT 8086 8088, 286, 386, 486... Take a look at my page about it ;) https://juangacovas.info/doku.php/windows/howtos/pcemu-page

[gattilorenz]

Sadly, PCem is now abandoned, but 86box is a fork which now has better interface and features

[DrSiemer]

Nice, that was our first as well! Fortunately my dad kept it, so in theory it should still work.

One of my oldest memories is hearing that digitized guitar intro of Mach 3 for the first time. I've played so many hours of Digger on that machine.

[pan69]

Same here! Hearing that coming out of a pc speaker was mesmerizing.

Our M24 broke down at some point. My dad took it away to get repaired and just left it there, he said "it couldn't be fixed, they said" :(

Another game that made a similar impression was Mean Streets [1], but this was on my 286 with VGA.

Years after I had moved out of the house I was horrified to find out that my Mom had tossed out all my old computer stuff without telling me (I had two Olivetti 286's, a 16 and 25 Mhz).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_Streets_(video_game)