Here's the short version of my story on my 1st Computer, the Tandy 1000 SX.....yep, THAT Is what I had in 1999.
Both my (half) Sisters are from the "Richer" half of the family. In 1987, their dad bought a brand new Tandy 1000 SX for his work from Radio Shack. IT was actually the first computer I ever used in my life. He had Microsoft Adventure for it in the original gray binder. I will never forget that sort of "high tech smell" that everything involving that computer had.
Anyway, in 1991, he bought my sister's an actual house - in a suburban neighborhood - during college. He also bought a 386 for my older sister, and gave the Tandy to my second older sister whom gave me the Tandy in 1997 when she moved out of that house to another town with her new husband.
That Tandy 1000 as my first education in computers.
When I first got it it was a 384K machine with 2 360K Floppy Drives and a Tandy DMP-12 Dot Matrix Printer.
By 1999 tthough, I'd upgraded it too 640K using the actual paper catalog books at Radio Shack and paid a whooping $45 for a 384K to 640K memory upgrade kit for the Tandy in 1998. It involved installing the provided Chips and then pulling a jumper on the motherboard. I did this so I could play Ultima VI: The False Prophet on that thing. God, those catalogs were a hoot - $4000 for a 20MB HDD from Radio Shack in 1998? When for the same price one could buy a friggin PEntium III with a 667MHz CPU, a Gig of RAM, 3D Accelerator, and a 20GB EIDE HDD for the cherry on top.
I'm sure I was the laughing stock of the teacher's lounge. Here comes kids with computer written reports done in Microsoft Word 97' on a Pentium I or II running Windows 9x, in pretty fonts, and then here come's ole' Creeping Net, tearing the pinfeed edges off of his book report as he wanders into class. For them, COmputer Research was an hour online and copypaste into Word - for me, it was borrow an Encyclopedia or go to the LIbrary, jot down my notes, then take it home, type it up in Deskmate, save to 360K Floppy, then print it out.
Either way, my setup was this.....
1987 Tandy 1000 SX - 640K RAM, 2x 360K DSDD Floppy, TGA, Tandy 3-VOice, MS-DOS 3.11 for the Tandy 1000 SX, Deskmate II, with 83 Key Tandy Keyboard, NO mouse, Tandy CM5 Color Monitor, and a Epson printer my mom purloined from work that was miles better than that DMP-12 was before it died.
I had a binder full of floppies, and I had a friend who had big box copies of Ultima V and VI for PC, yet no PC to play them on, and Legacy of the Ancients - all on 360K floppy. I was also taking Auto shop and our shop teacher had an IBM PC 5150 in the shop! I was the only kid who could use that thing. I pirated Tetris, Bugs, and Burger Blaster off him. And with the new Block Scheduling, we had a period at the end of class where I could play my Ultima V savegame in class on that 5150.
I did not get my first Windows PC until 2001 - Creeping Net 1 - a 486 DX-33 Zeos motherboard in a Flight 386 SX branded Kingspao AT chassis, running DOS 5 and Windows 3.1 off a 124MB HDD. That was also my first internet connected PC - I had AOL 3.0 and 4.0 running on it over a 56K modem on a 8250 UART serial port, requiring me to put a glass of water on top of the modem or it would overheat and drop connection! Everyone spent their time bugging me to upgrade to a Pentium 4 with Windows XP back in those days....so I grew a bit of disdain for that platform for awhile as a result.