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The earliest machine I remember using was an Amstrad, can't remember the model name but it had two 5.5in floppy drives and no hard disk. There was a very early graphical OS that you could boot from a floppy (maybe the first version of Windows?) and we played various games that came with magazines like Jason Jr and Spongs.
PC1512 with GEM?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC1512
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager
When I was 7 we got a 486 (the Pentium had just come out but had the floating point issue so Dad decided to stick with something proven), with Windows 3.1 and 8mb RAM and that was when my interest really started. Never really got into coding but became the authority on using it and wrote various boot discs allowing increased memory allocations for playing games like Desert Strike and Worms. With Win 95 coming along shortly after we bought it, the machine was obsolete pretty much immediately but we kept it until near the turn of the millenium.
I don't know about obsolete; sure, 16bit vs. 32bit, but Windows 95 was famously crap. I still prefer Windows 3.1 over it. Windows 3.1 also still has a life and can be run in various ways. I've forgotten what to look for, but people have made somewhat souped-up versions and Wine will run it, too.
Oliver Schick-
It might well have been the PC1512, both the mouse and the look and feel of the OS are ringing some very distant bells...
Yes that's a good point on Windows 3.1 vs 95, "obsolete" was very much my game-obsessed child's view on it as 95 had DirectX and pretty quickly games migrated away from DOS to needing Win 95 or above. That said I took copies of the six Win 3.1 floppies on the last machine I had that came with a floppy drive and now have an installation running on DosBOX for when the urge to play Sim Tower or Dr Drago's Madcap Chase strikes...
ASTTer
My dad had various strange old computers stowed away in the loft, a spectrum where the connection to a tape drive had broken so you could only boot it into basic, and a circuit board thing based around a 6502 chip with what looked like a calculator in the corner that you had to programme in hexadecimal. Apparently he spent a day with it once and got it to sum two single digit numbers and that was that.
The earliest machine I remember using was an Amstrad, can't remember the model name but it had two 5.5in floppy drives and no hard disk. There was a very early graphical OS that you could boot from a floppy (maybe the first version of Windows?) and we played various games that came with magazines like Jason Jr and Spongs. When I was 7 we got a 486 (the Pentium had just come out but had the floating point issue so Dad decided to stick with something proven), with Windows 3.1 and 8mb RAM and that was when my interest really started. Never really got into coding but became the authority on using it and wrote various boot discs allowing increased memory allocations for playing games like Desert Strike and Worms. With Win 95 coming along shortly after we bought it, the machine was obsolete pretty much immediately but we kept it until near the turn of the millenium.