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It all started at Flanders Technology International in 1987... a tech expo where an eleven-year-old watched a wooden block move across a desk and an arrow follow it on screen. That was it. That was the moment. He had to have a computer with a mouse.

What followed was a story of after-school showroom squatting, summer jobs, game piracy, a modem bill that nearly gave his parents a heart attack, and an education in computing that no school could have provided.

From the Amstrad PC1512 and the GEM windowing system, to the Schneider Euro PC with its infamous Turbo button that turned Ms. Pac-Man into a half-second blur — this episode is a love letter to the glorious chaos of home computing in the late 1980s.

Along the way: the satisfying clatter of a matrix printer , the dark arts of config.sys and autoexec.bat , Digger , the allure of the Commodore 64 , forbidden floppy disks at computer club, a 2400-baud modem, and the very first taste of online community — long before anyone called it the internet.

The computers

Amstrad PC1512 — the showroom machine that started it all
Schneider Euro PC — the computer-in-a-keyboard with the infamous Turbo button
Commodore 64 — legendary sounds, legendary forbidden floppy disks

Play the games

Digger — play in your browser
Ms. Pac-Man — play in your browser
Samantha Fox Strip Poker (C64)
Leisure Suit Larry — Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places — play in your browser

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HPR4606: My Nerdy Childhood: From Floppy Disks to Dial-Up Dreams