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> 8086 XT PC for my 8th birthday

Wow, I admire the far-sightedness of your parents, to give a child a computer at such a young age (and in those early days of PCs).

I was of a similar age when my dad brought home an NEC PC 9801 - with an 8086 CPU (8MHz), 640KB RAM, kanji (~3000 characters) font ROM, even a Japanese word processor. I think it ran MS-DOS 2~3.

"In 1987, NEC announced one million PC-98s were shipped."

That was a big wave, and I'm so glad my parents let me play with a computer as a "toy" - it was a huge influence on my mental development.

Kinda like the monolith moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey. :)



My parents had no idea, and they couldn't afford it anyway :) My dad asked his cousin, who happened to be working with PCs way, way back and recommended he get a PC instead of a C64 which is what everyone else had. My dad asked his dad and my grandfather forked over what must have been an insane amount back in 1980's Israel.


Aww, that's so nice that your dad asked around and pulled resources together for you. And I'm sure grandfather knew it was a worthy investment in your future.

My friends around that age all had a wildly popular video game console called Nintendo "Fami-Com". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System

My parents refused to buy it, and instead let me play with the PC-98, where I learned BASIC, Turbo Pascal, even some 8086 assembly language.

I suppose if I have children, I'd discourage mobile phones/apps and instead give them Raspberry Pi, microcomputers, sensors, devices they can build stuff with.




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