My first encounter with a PC was at a friend's house back in maybe first grade elementary. It was a Videoton XT type machine. It looked like a VT180, but it had a 286 CPU manufactured by AMD. It was severely outdated, but the only PC in our class.
This is the best I could find about it (page 6): https://www.holdcomputers.com/holdcomputers_e … ideoton_all.pdf
It had about half a dozen games, but all I remember are Prince of Persia, Grand Prix Circuit and maybe Wolfenstein 3D of which Prince of Persia had the biggest impact on me.

The next I would probably call defining was when around 4th grade the same friend upgraded to a P2 era machine. Celeron 333MHz, 64MB RAM and an S3Trio64V+ (which I still have with a memory upgrade) and an 8x speed CD drive (I also have it but it doesn't read). Back then I had my second PC with a 100MHz Pentium, 32MB RAM and probably also some generic budget graphics card. The games influenced me the most on this PC (my friend's) was Carmageddon and Need for Speed: High Stakes.

Then finally I got to take the spotlight when I upgraded to a 900MHz Celeron, 256MB RAM and a TNT2-M64 which for a brief year was the most powerful PC in my class, though obviously it was never really good. And with this one I had to pull through until about the end of first year high school. This means countless important and legendary games and in the early 2000s a lot of suffering and pain. Playing games with frame rate in the single digits for years really build character.

Well, I think in my case were my first experiences with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1(1). I remember messing around with both of those on what eventually became my little brother's room. My dad had the luxury computer with Windows 95. I remember always wanting to mess around with it but wasn't allowed to.

Then I remember using Windows 95 on an old Packard Bell desktop (back then not that old though), teaching myself some basic HTML while testing it with Netscape Navigator. Had a lot of fun with that.

Then some time later (around 10 years old back then) I was taught how to code in the pascal launguage by my dad using Turbo Pascal 6.0 under MS-DOS (although I sometimes switched to Windows 95 also installed on that computer for games).
Back then the only two games I actually played (besides programming and messing around with the PC speaker 🤣 beeping tones ) were Winter Challenge and the very first Megarace game (both on the same machine).

I would have never thought back then that I would eventually make an emulator that would emulate such a machine (not exactly Packard Bell machines, but close enough (the normal well-known IBM ones they were actually clones of)) with everything on it (video, audio etc.) so many years later (in other words: atm just a few years (about 5-10 years ago atm) ago when I started the project)!

It Takes Two
"Instead of having collectibles and other shiny s***, "