Comment by kwanbix
4 days ago
Similarly for me. My dad bought a fully expanded TI-99/4A from a friend who was selling it to buy a C64. On the TI, I learned LOGO and then BASIC, and played Parsec, BurgerTime, and others. Cartridges were super expensive in my home country.
A few years later, we traveled to New York and bought an IBM PC XT with a 20 MB (yes, MB!) hard drive, 640 KB of RAM, a floppy drive, and a CGA monitor. At the time, IBM had already announced the IBM PC AT with a 286 CPU, and Compaq was already selling clones.
My first PC was an XT Clone I suspect around the same time, One of these https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/15452/Olivetti-PC1-P...
I adored that thing (coming from a ZX Speccy it felt like a proper computer), I've considered buying/tracking down a non functional one and putting a high performance ITX build into it a few times over the years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe77esw9-nU (PC1 booting into a game) - that instantly takes me back more than 30 years.
EDIT: I forgot, one came up on Adrien's Digital Basement a while back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou-_sHTxwc4
> [...] I've considered buying/tracking down a non functional one and putting a high performance ITX build into it a few times over the years.
I'd buy a classic keyboard case x86 (with PCMCIA card slot, Enhanced Personal Computer Keyboard layout plus integrated trackball), preferably made to last, made out of metal. Sadly, no one makes decent cases for something like a Vortex86. It's either weird mini towers to appeal to the nostalgia of the Old Breed, or cheap 3D-printed contraptions in the vein of stompboxes (for MiSTer implementations). Sad.
One can build a really close approximation with 86box; in fact, you can build an original 5150.