Reply 40 of 52, by digger
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- Oldbie
The PC I could afford to buy the parts for back in those days was based on a Texas Instruments 486DLC. This must have been around 1993 or so.
I figured a 386 (even a DX) would be outdated at that point, but I couldn't afford an Intel 486, at least not a DX. The 486DLC (with math coprocessor installed on the motherboard) turned out to be the sweet spot for me at the time, in terms of affordability and performance. I believe it ran at 40MHz, but it may have been 33MHz.
I remember how I meticulously saved up money from my paper route to finally buy the components to build my own PC at that time. My Dad had an XT machine with CGA-compatible graphics and I was eager to upgrade.
Unfortunately, around the time I had saved up enough money to purchase all the components, a factory exploded somewhere in Asia, causing the prices of SIMMs to skyrocket overnight, throwing a bit of a wrench in my budget.
My Dad took me to an indoor computer fair called "PC Dump", which took place monthly in the RAI convention center in Amsterdam. Some of the Dutchies here might still remember the PC Dump days fondly. 😉 One could find some pretty good deals there if one shopped around and compared prices, with lots of competing vendors having their stands there in the same hall.) I managed to buy everything I needed, except for the RAM and a hard drive. Every stand that sold RAM there at a still somewhat reasonable price was sold out. There was one vendor willing to take a backorder for 4MB RAM at the prices he was offering them for at the fair, but we would have to pick up the memory some other time at his store, which I believe was located in Rotterdam.
I'll tell ya, having almost all the components at home except for one missing item, preventing me from being able to boot it up and playing with it, that was quite frustrating.
Anyway, once my Dad had picked up the RAM for me some time later, I could finally assemble a working PC, albeit still without a hard drive.
But at least I could play some games on floppy, in EGA or VGA mode and with a sound card! I would acquire a Conner 250MB IDE hard drive later, for a reasonable price.