Some kids upon graduating high school will take out a loan to buy a new car. Not me. I went to the bank to get a 2500 buck loan to buy a butt-whoopping system. Nowadays I think of this system as Tag Along. It was this time in my life where I moved every other week. This system, took a beating going from home to home. About 3 months after I bought this system, I added the CD-ROM. Multimedia, whoo-hoo. Adventure games where at their peak. I played through Loom, King's Quest V, Ultima VII, and Wing Commander II. I also got my first taste of Windows. About this time, I was turned on to the BBS craze. Before the internet, some kind people used to setup a BBS. You could dial into thier computers and download shareware, leave email for other users of the BBS, and even play some simple text based games. For a short period, I even hosted a little BBS. Moonshine Online. I ran the BBS when I was not playing games. It was through a BBS that I was turned on to a little game you may have heard of... DOOM. Another toy I got hooked on was a color printer. I spent countless hours designing comics, calendars, newsletters and printing them out in color. Granted, the print quality was utter crap, but it was fun for me.
Gateway 2000 486sx/25
- Intel 80486/sx CPU clocked at 25 Mhz
- 8192 kilobytes RAM (8x 1meg 70ns SIMMs)
- 210 meg IDE hard drive
- 1.44 meg 31/2 inch floppy drive
- 1.2 meg 51/4 inch floppy drive
- ATI Graphics Ultra ISA 1meg DRAM
- Sound Blaster Pro Deluxe 16-bit ISA
- Single Speed Creative Labs CD-ROM (caddy)
- Zoom 14.4k modem
- Microsoft Serial Mouse
- Crystal Scan 14 inch color VGA monitor (interlaced .39 dot pitch)
- MS-DOS 5.0
- Windows 3.1
- Panasonic KX-P2123 color 24 pin dot-matrix printer
Total system cost: $2450 (purchased in 1992)
Sold for: $800 (sold in 1994)