It's a Pixel THING

You’ve probably already noticed that I’m a huge fan of PC gaming, since the early days of Point’n’Click Adventures!

So, let’s track down the origins of the Personal Computer (PC) as we know it nowadays!


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Back in 1989 there was a game that always intrigued me. Every time I went to one of my favorite local ZX Spectrum videogame selling spots I got somehow mesmerized by the cover of War in Middle Earth. By that time I didn’t have any background on the magnificent J.R.R. Tolkien masterpiece.
Then, one day, I finally picked the game up and brought it home. Placed it in my Spectrum and run it. My first impressions were of complete blankness. I didn’t know what to do or to what I was looking at. Back then this was the main problem with pirated games that were normally sold in electronic stores without any kind of officious fiscal control that could protect the intellectual property of their creators. In this particular case, the original boxed game brought a forty-three page manual that, obviously, the pirated one didn’t have making it really hard for newbies to the Tolkien universe to understand.
Only a few years later I read the books and was absolutely blown away by the details, characters …

The PS/1 line of computers was IBM’s successful return to the home market in 1990 and this specific model from 1993 was the very first time that I saw a tower model, even before the Amiga 4000T arrived. I fell in love with it right away and started saving some money getting also a part-time job just to get one of these! Even so, it wouldn’t have been possible without the help of my parents, ‘cause these IBM machines were so freaking expensive, as you can see by the numbers printed in the original invoice that I’ve kept all these years! Its price was three hundred and ninety thousand escudos, around two thousand euros in today’s money!
It came originally with 4 megabytes of ram, one hundred and seventy megabytes of hard disk space and it’s a DX2 with 66 MHz and not a DX/33 as stated in the invoice. Through the years, I’ve managed to get some extra ram, to a total of 16 megabytes, and replaced the original hard drive so that I could get an astonishing number of five hundred and twenty ei…