In December of 1990 Sinterklaas brought me my first computer: a Commodore VIC-20, hooked to a tape drive and a nice small black/white TV set. Certainly a nice gift for a 12 year old! The VIC gave me lots of fun tinkering and quickly I wanted more computing power ... about 7 months later a good report card yielded a nice surprise: a 286 tower with 1MB RAM, 1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive and a Green/Black Hercules Mono screen!
While this machine did not come with a Hard Disk, I spent a lot of time in MS-DOS 4.1: exploring Dr. Genius, BASIC and ... Sierra Games :)
About a year later the machine was upgraded with an extra meg of memory (the motherboard was actually swapped as the original board only supported 1MB), a Hard Drive and a colour graphics card with an SVGA monitor. Not only could I now play some decent games such X-Wing and the LucasArts adventure games, I also had MS-DOS 5.0, Windows 3.0 and Word 2.0 at my disposal.
In 1994 I finally acquired a printer, a loud 9pin Dot Matrix Epson. (I traded it for a Queen Live at Wembley '86 CD, if memory serves me). The ribbon was still in working order and many school assignments were printed on the old beast (imagine a printer which needs several passes for each line to actually make the print quality readable!)
1995 brought another set of upgrades as I reassembled the PC myself: first a simple 386 SX/20 board, then a 386 DX/33. A whopping 4MB of RAM was installed, and I finally got to roam some BBSs on a 14.4 modem by the end of the year.
Finally the machine was sold in 1996 to make some money for a summer trip. To serve my text processing needs a cheap XT was picked up as temporary replacement.