My first computer was a Gateway Intel 486 DX2, and let me tell you, it was both a dream and a nightmare. That chunky beige box took up half my desk, and the monitor was so heavy you practically needed a crane to move it. But to me, it was pure magic.
This was back in the days of Windows 3.1, when everything was a sea of grey menus, and the mouse still had a ball inside (which always got clogged with dust). I spent hours playing Doom, SimCity, and Lemmings, all loaded from 3.5-inch floppy disks that I had to swap in and out constantly.
But the real battle? Trying to get games to actually run. Every new game seemed to demand just a little more memory than I had, which meant diving into the BIOS, AUTOEXEC.BAT, and CONFIG.SYS files like some kind of teenage hacker. I had no clue what I was doing, but I was convinced that tweaking a few settings would magically unlock enough power to play the latest and greatest. Sometimes, it worked. Other times, I completely messed things up and had to beg my dad for help.
And then came the internet—or rather, dial-up. That beautiful screeching noise as the modem connected was the sound of adventure. But God help you if someone picked up the phone mid-download! Trying to get a single webpage to load felt like watching paint dry, and downloading a song? That was an overnight commitment.
Looking back, that old Gateway PC was so clunky compared to today’s sleek machines, but it was also where my love of tech and gaming really started. It taught me patience, problem-solving, and that sometimes, no matter how much you tweak a config file, a game just isn’t going to run.
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