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Comment by kwanbix | Hacker News Reader

My first computer was an original IBM PC XT. It had 8088, 640kb or RAM, 20MB Seagate HD, and a 360kb dd. Software was so lean that we would use smartdrive (or something like that), to use 360kb of RAM as a virtual disk and copy the games there so that they will load faster.

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In 1995 I bought my first computer, a very old original IBM PC XT for about USD 100. That was my economic limit.

It had a MDA card, no graphics at all. The rest of the hardware was as you describe.

I was at least able to exchange the MDA card for a Hercules and play some very oldie games on a monochrome monitor.

The details are foggy, but Loom in particular had some way to be playable on monochrome graphics, perhaps with some kind of CGA emulator. I have vivid memories of playing through this game on my Compaq XT clone in black-and-yellow with no mouse. Similar time frame; my family got the machine around 93-94 on a pretty low budget, but I learned a TON on it until we managed to buy a Pentium 133 a few years later.

I remember playing some CGA games with some Hercules graphics card. There was two TSR programs which made it possible to run CGA color games with the yellow-on-black Hercules display.

Can't remember the name of the other one but one of them was definitively SIMCGA [https://www.pcorner.com/list/GRAPHUTI/SIMCGA41.ZIP/INFO/]

Without that awesome program my childhood would've been a lot less intresting.

Solid memory! It was definitely SIMCGA that I had and it worked awesome. Thanks for the nostalgia hit!

I remember playing some Spiderman game for PC with ega graphics (or at least had a 16 color palette) on the 286 of my father with monochrome (Hercules ?) display.

That IBM XT keyboard would be worth $100 today if you could find it.

Unfortunately it is long gone. Our living space back then was too limited to keep old machines around. Actually, it still is.

Same with my first PC. It was the around 1991 and that 20Mb harddrive seemed like an enormous space, I had so much software and games on it. And also had windows 3.0 which kindof sucked so I was spending most time in DOS.

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