This beast of a machine lasted me through 1994 learning BASIC and Turbo Pascal, scouring local BBS systems on an external Hayes 300baud modem
While the IBM was still in working condition we eventually leaped into the future in the form of a blazing Packard Bell Pentium 1 desktop, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, a single speed CDROM, 256 color monitor and probably an unheard of 20MB of hard drive space. This opened me up to the world of the internet and AOL, the leader in getting people online (my how the times have changed). Porn in the form of images that could be fetched from AOL chat rooms in torrent style fashion. Games like Myst and Doom2 on CD that simply blew the mind, especially since my shiny new 14.4kbps internal modem could call my friend Paul's PC and we could play Doom2 against each other LIVE head to head (id software always had the right idea) hoping that no family member at either house would pick up the phone and taint our modem session.
One of my "fondest" memories was when Windows 95 was released and a classmate had been given a beta copy of it who passed it on to me to install on our now 3 month old Packard Bell. This was my first introduction into the Blue Screen of Death and learning the ins and outs of Windows. After a very intense night of trying to get Win95 to successfully boot on what I then considered a "broken" PC I threw in the towel late that night and attempted to get some sleep trying not to panic that I had completely hosed our $2000 investment. Thankfully the first thing I had done before attempting the upgrade was back up the entire PC on 25 to 30 some floppy disks. Needless to say I spent that Saturday nervously re-installing Windows 3.11 and no one in the house had a clue as to what I had done or what I had gone through in order to get the Packard Bell back in working condition. I seriously never saw Win95 again.
College saw me continuing my PC background in 1998 with the purchase of a generic barebones 366MHz Windows 98 box that I actively tinkered with. 56kbps modem, 8MB graphics card with 16million color graphics, 32x CDROM (still no CD burner), 100-something MB hard drive, and eventual broadband internet. Napster, Lime Wire, Bear Share, IRC and Kazaa lead the pack for downloading music, warez (which introduced me to Visual Studio) and God knows what else before they all became victims to viruses, worms, the RIAA, and the ever-reaching government (again - how the times have changed). I was a PC through and through and simply scoffed at Apple and its Macs which I hadn't used since middle school to type reports and play games during my free period. I had actually dual booted the PC for some time with Red Hat Linux. Apple as a foreign, dirty word that had no place in my little expanding PC world that had become old hat and was obsolete unless you were deep into photo and video editing.
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