My very first computer was a commodore 64. I splurged for 2 disk drives, and a killer accelerator card that had a built in hex editor. It allowed me to edit the disks directly - it was the ultimate hack tool, back in the day. People today talk about all the protections that Maxis includes in their software. Much of that protection was first developed on, and for, the commodore computer.
For $1000, I became the proud owner of an original IBM 4.77MHz 8086 computer, complete with 640K of RAM, a 170K 5 1/2" floppy drive, a 10Mb hard drive, a hercules monochrome graphics card, a 'green screen' monitor, and a super cool 9 pin dox maxrix printer.
It was my first IBM. The day I got it home, I started looking at all the wonderful toys that came with MSDOS 1.1. That's how I discovered that one can wipe out the hard drive without realizing it. Lucky for me, there was a guy in town who could put it back together for me, for a small fee.
And naturally, the very day I got it back home, I did the same thing again.
On the third trip to his workshop, he sat me down and explained what the various programs do. He taught me how to not crash the hard drive, but also how to put it back together if I do.
I was hooked.
From there, I bought all the OSs. Zenith DOS, IBMs PC DOS, MS DOS, and Digital Research DR DOS. All had their quirks, bugs and merits. I started combining versions and utilities to get the best of them all.
Now, the thing about these computers is that only 256K was on the motherboard. The rest was on a separate memory card. And the clock crystals were soldered onto the boards. It was nothing at the time to buy faster crystals and solder them in. I managed to speed up the bus to just under 6MHz before the first board failed. I remember it was my memory expansion card that failed first. I didn't know it at the time, but I was overclocking before overclocking was a thing.
After reviewing all these versions of DOS, I recall telling my father that if he gave me $10K, I would retire a millionaire. Even as a teen, I knew MS was going to win the DOS wars and become big... real big.
But eventually, all my friends started joking about me literally turning my computer on and going for a cup of coffee in the time it took for my machine to boot up. So I splurged for a 12MHz 286. What was funny is that the 25MHz 286 was the latest and greatest. And I remember a quote from a rep at the computer convention in Vegas that year. He said "The 25MHz 286 was more computer than most people will ever need"
My 286 sported 1Mb of memory - which introduced me to upper memory. And I eventually expanded it to 2Mb, which introduced me to expanded memory.
This was about the time I started getting "The computer shopper" delivered to my door - by that time it was bigger than even the biggest telephone books.
Then I bought myself a 25MHz 386sx with 2Meg of extended memory. By this time, the only DOS still in business was MS. 3.11 was the standard, and 4 was on the way. At this time, I became a self taught expert in Quarterdecks QEMM and Qualitas QMax. I got pretty good at combining the two and even wrote a basic program that optimized the creation of upper memory blocks, and finding the most efficient order to load programs and data into them. Then I fell in love with Deskview386.
At the time, I was heavy into electrical engineering and Pspice. So I paid a premium price for that Cyrix 387 mathco. It was the ultimate math chip. And it was a miracle worker. But, as luck would have it, a buddy of mine pulled it out one day to look at it. He never grounded himself. When he plugged it back in, it was DOA. I still had all my electrical designs and simulations, but simulating a single cycle went from a few minutes back to half a day.
I was not all that impressed when Windows 1 came out. I heard it called "the most expensive solitaire game ever", and I agreed. But then W.2 came out. Once Windows 3 came out, I knew DOS was dead, even if Deskview worked better than W1 and 2.
I had been out of the game for a couple of decades. I missed the whole pentium revolution. So once I got the chance, I decided to see what I could do. I built my own last year.
Windows 10 - free, of course
Asus maximus VIII hero mb
4.0GHz 6700 processor
32GB 4400 DDR4
Geforce 980Ti graphics card.
4x SATA3 SSD RAID 0
Nothing is world record breaking, but it's a ton more computer than I'll ever need. (seriously, I'm a half century old, and the most processor intensive games I play are Stellaris, Civilization, and SimCity. I must admit - I just don't see why so few people use 4 drive RAIDS. The bus between memory and drive is clearly the most common bottleneck these days. SSDs are a bit better, 2 drive RAIDS are OK but they really miss the big benefit of RAIDs. But imo, a 4SSD RAID0 makes everything lightning fast.
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