I'm pushing 40, and still shake my head in wonder sometimes about just how much is possible at such small scale and cost.
But this is now turning into "when I were a lad..." :)
My XT had an 8088 @ ~4mhz in it, and we pushed it uphill to school both ways, in the snow!
It was multi-functional though. The power supply was inefficient enough to heat the room, while simultaneously being heavy enough to bludgeon large creatures for sustenance.
Something inside me misses the radiant heat, sitting here on a cold day with my chilly metallic laptop.
(Not even joking, by the way - literally how I got into computers and programming.)
you kids and you petabytes of ram! back in my day....
/s
(i'm looking forward for these comments to be commented on a certain website i'm not supposed to name)
ZX81: Z80/1KB RAM... more recently though PIC12 (C501 IIRC) ...
Ran windows 3.1, Civilisation (VGA graphics), railroad tycoon, Star Trek 25th anniversary - and could have them all installed at the same time. Other programs included championship manager 93, and I think day of the tentacle.
But it wouldn’t run Linux - 386 and above.
We ran Windows 3.0 and my father configured a boot entry for running Doom or Ultima 7, which required so much memory that it wasn't possible to run Windows, only DOS.
I remember feeling a bit envious about my neighbor having the more powerful 486, which could run Doom much faster than in our PC
Worse part was my Dad in his wisdom bought a family PC without a Pentium, but a Cyrix P166. Had zero floating point processing. Ran like a damn dog on any 3D game.
Any Brits out there might remember Time Computers. On every back page of any newspaper ever selling PoS computers with whatever subpar hardware they could cram into a big beige box ;-)
If I remember right it was almost $3k...but that included that blazing fast 300bps Hayes modem for wide-area networking.
And my mind was truly blown when we replaced the 2nd floppy with a more-memory-then-we-will-EVER-need 20MB hard drive...what could we do with all those bits??
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 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.