To see Wolfenstein 3D smoothly rendering its glorious violence in full 256 color VGA was utterly amazing. This machine only had an AdLib in it, so no sound effects, but it didn’t matter. One fateful day it was the shareware version of Wolfenstein 3D.

Soon enough, this uber PC got pulled out into the middle of the classroom so we could all gather around it, watching and taking turns playing whatever the latest random game someone smuggled in and managed to get working was. Us nerdy delinquents quickly discovered that one was a cut above the rest, though: a 386 with a VGA adapter and an soundcard.

Other than our teacher’s PCs, which were more or less dedicated to ham and, soon, running our middle school’s official bulletin board system, most of the computers we had were some form of outdated IBM AT clone with zero notable upgrades to speak of. Our computer lab was in a pretty sorry state. For one reason or another, the club almost instantly devolved into most of us just hanging out in the computer lab and screwing around most every afternoon, and we were absolutely fine with that. The class was okay, but the main event was what happened when the last bell of the day rang and our computer teacher’s newly formed ham radio club gathered. The first ever class I had with semi-modern IBM compatible PCs. One of those few opportunities was my 8th grade computer class. While it seemed like I might have finally worn them down, I’d do whatever I could to play with any and every kind of computer whenever the opportunity presented itself in the meantime. I’d been whining to my poor parents about wanting a new PC for literally years. For posterity’s sake you can also click them to view the “pixel perfect” originals. Note: The screenshots posted on this page have been scaled up a little from their tiny native resolutions as well as had their aspect ratios corrected to proper 4:3 dimensions as they should have looked on CRT monitors originally.

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