I'd been curious about computer gaming when the kids across the street let my little brother and me play Choplifter and Spy Hunter on their Apple IIe with a monochrome screen. That was just a rare treat, though, as I think that computer was technically their dad's for work.
My folks got us a Tandy 1000 TX with a Tandy color monitor, no HD, and dual floppy drives from Radio Shack. The game they brought home with it was Space Quest, and we were absolutely hooked the first night. Police Quest, Space Quest 2, and other Sierra titles soon followed. We even spent hours at a time on Rogue and its quirky ASCII graphics. We borrowed Microsoft Flight Simulator which led to picking up F19 Stealth Fighter.
A friend of mine had an older brother who pirated a bunch of cool stuff like Marble Madness, Arkanoid, Rush'n Attack, Platoon, and Mach 3. I could and did sit for hours in that world.
We moved up to a Tandy 1000 TL/2 a couple years later and then a Tandy 2500sx 20 Hard Drive a couple years after that (Dad was a big Radio Shack devotee), so the game complexity evolved, too (Wing Commander, Wolfenstein 3d, the Carmen San Diego series, etc.). The 2500sx suffered from the relocated 3voice memory reality, so we installed a Media Vision Thunderboard to get good sound and a couple extra megs of RAM to enable digital speech in Wing Commander 2.
The last PC we had before I graduated was an AST Advantage 486dx 33 I got to upgrade with a single speed CDROM with caddy. On that we had XWing, Tie Fighter, Privateer, Battle Chess, Space Quest 4, Police Quest 3, Dune 2, and of course Doom.
Each era is a sacred time in my memory. I somehow learned a lot but still knew little and had so much fun.
