4 years before our first family PC, my father bought an IBM PC clone running on an Intel 8088 for use in his LTO office. I made a dBase ]I[+ program on it that recorded all the vehicle registrations in his office back then. My brother and I had to input them one by one, field by field! His branch was the first to use a PC for recording vehicle registrations. He even guested on TV and was interviewed about this PC.

That office PC had no hard drive! The records were held on 360KB 5.25" floppy disks!

One had to switch the Turbo on so that it ran at 10Mhz, from the default 4.77Mhz!

My first ever personally-owned PC was an IBM PC-XT compatible rig with an 8086 processor, MFM HDD, the capacity of which I cannot remember. It also had 2 5.25" FDD's, and it came with an 80-column Star NX-something dot-matrix printer (24-pins FTW!). Together with its computer table, and all the licensed software on floppies, I bought it second hand for 20,000 pesos! The Greenhills folks marvelled at what a bargain it was (circa 1991)!

Both of those XT's had monochrome green monitors.

My first mouse was an optical one which cost me a whopping Php1,800!!! Back then optical mice were still a new technology to Filipinos, and each one had to have its own mouse pad especially made for optical mice (dotted surface).

About 2 years after this, I replaced it with a 386SX-25Mhz machine with an 11" color VGA monitor, to which i attached an HP Deskjet 500 (Php 12,500) and a Sound Blaster Pro sound card (Php4,500) with a 1x CD-ROM drive (Php 11,000) that used a caddy for discs and came with LOOM, that Luftwaffe game, Where in the world is Carmen San Diego, etc.

How time flies when you're having fun... :sigh: