50 years from now, this might be a conversation I have with my son and grandson"

Me: "I remember the time we had a dot matrix printer"

Son: "What's a dot matrix printer?"

Grandson: "What's a printer?"

Some time 199x, when I was still a little kiddo, my dad bought a PC. It had a big ass HDD (dimensions-wise), 1x 3.5" floppy disk drive and a 5.25" floppy disk drive. It ran DOS. Dad managed to hook up a dot matrix Epson printer to it and used the computer for writing... whatever, really :)

Then dad got some of those 5" floppies with games and installed them on our PC. Mach3, Indy, Entity and Atlantis were my favourite ones. Later we got Wolfenstein 3-D, but that was just too scary, too intense for me.

All that was years before we got Windows 3.0 installed there.

Most interesting bug caused - created printer driver for vietnamese diacritical marks for old matrix printer without VN support by switching to graphics mode and plotting the dots and dashes. Print speed reduced about 200x and printer shook itself to pieces by rotating the cylinder back and forth. Oh well... Ended up buying two new laser printers instead.

It’s all a blur but in 5th grade I was using a TRS-80 with a cassette player for storage at the library where my mom worked. Also an Apple IIe at school in the computer lab. My first personal computer was an IBM XT clone with an 8086 processor and dot matrix printer. I bought it after having fun with my cousin’s Commodore 64 and wanting one, but his uncle sold me on the IBM platform as something that I could upgrade over time. I was 13 when I first learned Assembler and BASIC. Big Blue Disk was my favorite subscription software with all the games and other shareware stuff that came every month in the mail.

My uncle had a computer with a dot matrix printer attached. I remember that there was a Python turtle like drawing program. Spend quite some hours making blocky single line drawings with that. Printed some too.
No clue what kind of computer it was though. Probably a PC clone like headstart.

DOS and Wordstar, I was one of the few kids who submitted assignments on printouts from a dot matrix printer while everyone else was using typewriters. But what really got me hooked on computers? SimEarth and SimCity.