[ghinda]

I also have a similar, but definitely not tragic, story. In the late '90s my dad got us a ZX Spectrum, so me and my brother learned BASIC and played Deathchase.

Around ~2000 we got a Pentium "75", that is - 75mhz, 16mb ram, 500mb hdd with no cdrom or sound card. I think it had a 2mb S3 video card, and came with Windows 95.

At some point, after some tweaks, you could play Mortal Kombat 4 in a very small window, installed from multi-rar archives on around ~20 floppys.

We had a lot CDs with games from gaming magazines, with "cool" (or so I thought at the time) HTML/JavaScript autoruns, that ran with Internet Explorer 4. Since most of these games (eg. NFS 3) wouldn't run on my PC, I found out how to "View Source", and I basically learned HTML/CSS/JS from them. In 2003 I sold my first "DHTML" menu widget.