Does a C64 count? If so, that was my first. However, I’m not that old; 286 machines were already available at the time, we just couldn’t afford it.
Fast forward few years, and we bought our first IBM XT; it had a nifty 8088 processor in it. It had MS DOS 5.0 on it, and I loved it so much.
However, by the time I actually started to learn programming, our home computer was a 286 (this was around the 486 era). It had MS DOS 6.22 (I still have the installer disquettes (yes, floppies); I wonder if they still work). I used DOS Shell on it, and Norton Commander (sometimes Volkov, it was much smaller), and a bit later, Microsoft Windows 3.1 (for which I still have the floppies). Oh, and I will never forget my mom’s face when I first tried what the FDISK program can do…
It’s funny to write about all these OSes on my notebook, which has more CPU power and RAM inside that all my childhood computers altogether (including my first AMD Duron machine that I bought, with 512MB of RAM) in a box smaller than my first programming book.
Steven Ventimiglia
Creative Technologist & Sr. Front-End Developer