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Re:My Business Card Runs Linux by lioeters on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @10:31AM (#21878840)
> 8086 XT PC for my 8th birthday

Wow, I admire the far-sightedness of your parents, to give a child a computer at such a young age (and in those early days of PCs).

I was of a similar age when my dad brought home an NEC PC 9801 - with an 8086 CPU (8MHz), 640KB RAM, kanji (~3000 characters) font ROM, even a Japanese word processor. I think it ran MS-DOS 2~3.

"In 1987, NEC announced one million PC-98s were shipped."

That was a big wave, and I'm so glad my parents let me play with a computer as a "toy" - it was a huge influence on my mental development.

Kinda like the monolith moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey. :)

Re:My Business Card Runs Linux by xenospn on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @09:50PM (#21881758)
My parents had no idea, and they couldn't afford it anyway :) My dad asked his cousin, who happened to be working with PCs way, way back and recommended he get a PC instead of a C64 which is what everyone else had. My dad asked his dad and my grandfather forked over what must have been an insane amount back in 1980's Israel.
Re:My Business Card Runs Linux by lioeters on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @11:36PM (#21882048)
Aww, that's so nice that your dad asked around and pulled resources together for you. And I'm sure grandfather knew it was a worthy investment in your future.

My friends around that age all had a wildly popular video game console called Nintendo "Fami-Com". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System

My parents refused to buy it, and instead let me play with the PC-98, where I learned BASIC, Turbo Pascal, even some 8086 assembly language.

I suppose if I have children, I'd discourage mobile phones/apps and instead give them Raspberry Pi, microcomputers, sensors, devices they can build stuff with.