A couple of years after having the EX my dad bought a new machine -the HX- which couldn't play one of my favorite games I played on the EX (the PC version of the Ghostbusters game) so he got rid of it and got the EX back.
Eventually we got the SX which could play the Ghostbusters game (or it's possible the game was old enough by that point for me to not care) IIRC that machine had an 80286 processor, still a 5 1/4 floppy bay and maybe even a 3 1/4 floppy bay. Then the magic happened! We got it expanded to 640K of memory!
THEN we got a 20 MB hard drive! I still remember my dad's reaction when we had filled up the 20MB drive, "How did you guys fill up 20 megabytes?!"
It's funny to think about those old beasts of machines, things my cell-phone can do laps around when it comes to computing and those old machines were large, noisy and put out some serious heat. God, that sound of an old-school hard-drive clicking and running up is just one of those nifty sounds from my childhood that can just bring to me a smile.
All of these machines ran MS-DOS.
Eventually we got a Tandy Sensation! (80486 DX @ 25mhz, 4mb RAM) and that machine stuck around long past its useful lifespan. That machine had a CD-ROM in it and my dad insisted we put the 5 1/4 floppy into it even though that disc format was extinct by that point. It had, I believe, a 100mb hard drive.
When we finally got a new machine it was a IBM machine (by that point I think Tandy had stopped making machines and Radio Shack (where my dad worked) started carrying IBM.)
That may have been a 686 running at probably 100 Mhz or so with 8 or 16 MB of RAM and probably a 1/4 GB hard drive. That machine stuck around... for a while. It ran Windows 3.11 and actually had a modem which we used to get on bulletin boards and eventually the internet.
Around 1995 or 96 we got another new machine that I don't recall much about. It was likely another IBM machine operating on whatever the top specs were at that time, it ran Windows 95 and my parents kept that machine for a long time as well. When I graduated High School that's when I bought my own machine as outlined above.
Eventually when I moved out and my buddy and I started a bit of a computer business my parents bought a computer from us that ran at around 350 Mhz, probably 256 MB of ram with a 20-50 GB hard drive running Windows 98. During that same period we built five machines for an in-home network job all were top of the line machines so they had 450-500 Mhz processors, memory maxed out on motherboards (probably around a GB or so, whatever was the most at the time Windows could support) and the largest hard-drives at the time. Again, this was probably around 100 GB. All of those computers we had running Windows 98 as it was still the "best' operating system at the time to run machines on, the server had Windows NT on it but eventually was given Windows 98 as to us working on that proved a bit more stable. Not a chance in hell we were putting Windows ME on it!
When I look back at those machines at at what I have now (2.5 GHZ, 2 GB Memory, 500GB hard drive) it's amazing to me how much technology has changed in the last 25 years since getting that first computer way back then and now.
Hell, how much things have changed in just the last 10 years.
But, I definitely need to look into building a new machine.
Looking it up real quick, on my phone:
Processor: 624 MHZ
Memory: 512 MB of RAM
Storage: 256 MB.
So it's pretty much on par with those machines I build, and even owned, 10 years ago, aside from the storage. That's incredible to think of that right now in my hands, I hold basically the same type of computer that took up and entire desk 10 years ago and cost me almost $800 to build. This phone cost me around $100.
I suspect they all became Archimedes computers by the time I left, though (I wanted an Archimedes so badly when I was 11), although now they're probably all PCs.
