First 16 or 32 bit personal computing, share your stories

Histories
21

Fantastic story, Phil, thanks for sharing!

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22

In my case, it was the Amiga 500 as well.

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23

I was quite late to the 16-bit party, because my job as an auto mechanic didn’t require it and my personal interests and hobbies were fulfilled by my Franklin Ace 2000, an 8-bit Apple //e compatible. It was 1995, and my brother-in-law gifted me a retired PC-AT with Amber Monochrome, a 5.25" floppy and DOS 3.3 … I think the hard drive was only 20 MB, but I enjoyed exploring the new territory. It was definitely a big step up in power, but I soon learned that x86 assembly language gives me a headache. The keyboard was glorious.

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24

I think my jump was rather dramatic from the 8 bit ZX Spectrum to a hand-built x86 system with an AMD K5 @ 90 Mhz, 32 MB RAM and a 800 Mb HDD drive. Had a friend in my quiet neighborhood that was into building and selling PC’s and I bought the thing for around 180$ back in '99. Had a 15" color monitor, a crappy keyboard and mouse that I had to clean often since it caught all the junk from my desk, so I was happy about it.

I had a bit of programming knowledge under my belt by that time, so I tried to figure out how can I do assembly on that machine. Then I discovered the memory paging which baffled me. Didn’t pursue assembly on that (which was probably the sane thing to do anyway) and years after and one computer upgrade later, I started learning and programming in Visual Basic 6.

This was, in fact, my first ever “serious” project made from scratch: https://youtu.be/KLQ_HlZkStA

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25

I forgot the “32” in the OP question. My first 32 bit computing experience is from before I had seen a home computer. When I was 9, I took some computer programming mini-courses from LSU. IBM 3033 (32 bit). I was so ignorant of what computers were like, so I only knew what they taught. Non-interactive batch programming, with line editing Fortran source code and submitting batch jobs via JCL.

At this point, I had never seen an “interactive” computer like a home computer running BASIC. I just thought, “Well, this is what computers are like.”

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