Actually it was not mine, it belonged to my family.

According to the List of past Gateway products in Wikipedia, that means we got it sometime in 1991, which sounds about right. I would have been 11. Before we got it, I remember helping my dad research computers in Computer Shopper (which was about as thick as a phonebook at the time). I believe there was also an IBM PS/2 in the running.

The 486 refers to Intel’s 80486 microprocessor, which was the last in the x86 series before being rebranded “Pentium” (commemorating the 5th generation). Current Intel consumer processors sold today are from the 7th and 8th generation of the x86 architecture.

The 33 refers to the speed of the processor, in this case 33MHz. Top of the line processors today run at 3000MHz (more commonly written 3GHz).

I remember playing Lemmings, SimCity, and Wing Commander II on it. I also toyed with a shareware ray-tracing program (with a lot of assistance from dad) to create some “photo-realistic” 3D computer graphic scenes. I got very good with DOS. Yeah, MS DOS. I played with QuickBASIC some.

Anyway, I just started thinking about all this after reading that Acer [plans] to buy Gateway for $710 million.

• Earl, we’ve got a problem with the Dell Configurator in aisle 3
• Get the attention of the geek in your life
• on human computer interaction
• step away from the computer
• developmental stages of a computer programmer

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