The Technomancer’s Tales — Stories of Compute from 8088 to the Modern Era, #1 | by Cypher619 | Aug, 2025
## 💾 The Early Machines
### The 8088
The first machine I ever touched was an **8088-based PC** my mom used for accounting work in the late ’80s. She worked for a major bank, and having a work-from-home system back then was rare.
I was 9 years old. When she wasn’t home, I’d crack open the case, pull components, inspect them slot by slot, and reassemble everything before she returned. By the time she got home, it was always back in one piece and running.
**OS:** MS-DOS 1.0
**First software package:** *Lotus Symphony 1A*
**Disks:** Dual 360K floppies
Back then, every I/O device lived on its **own ISA expansion board**:
– Serial/parallel ports on one card
– Video output on another
– Floppy controller separate
– Hard disk controller? Barely a concept yet
Each card had **jumpers or DIP switches** for:
– IRQs
– DMA channels
– Base I/O addresses
There was **no auto-detect**. If two cards tried to use IRQ 5? Your system froze. You had to *know your hardware*. And I did.
— –
### The Apple IIe
At my private school, I took computer classes from 5th through 8th grade — all on the **Apple IIe**. These weren’t classes on spreadsheets or word processors. They were about programming.
I was introduced to **Line-Numbered BASIC** and **Logo**. Suddenly, computing wasn’t just games or typing papers — it was problem-solving, logic, and creativity.
Programming then wasn’t forgiving. No IDE, no syntax hints, no debugger. BASIC was linear, each line prefixed with a number:
10 PRINT “HELLO, WORLD!”
20 END
You could jump with commands like `GOTO 100`, but if you had to insert new logic, you’d hack in something like:
15 PRINT “GOODBYE, WORLD!!”
For bigger rewrites, you had to **renumber everything** and fix your `GOTO` references manually. It was brutal.
By the end of 6th grade, though, I had written a **Battleship clone** against the CPU — with ANSI graphics, colored text, and even rudimentary sound.
— –
### The 386
At 11, I got my own PC: a **Packard Bell 386-SX/16** running DOS 3.3. This one had a hard drive — advertised as 80MB, but I lucked out with a **91MB Seagate RLL drive**.
This was **before IDE plug-and-play**. You had to manually enter hard drive geometry into the BIOS:
– Cylinders
– Heads
– Sectors per track
Installing a drive meant *calibrating it*. CPUs of the day weren’t fast enough to read sectors sequentially, so drives used **sector interleaving** — skipping ahead sectors so the CPU had time to keep up. Common interleaves were 2:1 or 3:1.
I learned all of this from **PC Magazine** and a local periodical called *ComputorEdge*. Back then, these mags weren’t just ads — they taught you how to troubleshoot IRQ conflicts, optimize performance, and even included BASIC or assembly code snippets you could type in yourself.
Using those guides, I discovered that interleave could be adjusted. With **DEBUG.EXE**, I connected to the firmware of hard drive controllers, tweaked interleave values, and benchmarked load times. I found the optimal settings not just for my system, but for my friends’ too.
The first PC I ever built myself was a **386-SX/40**. I hunted parts through ads in *ComputorEdge*, saving allowance and lunch money, and even doing paid tweak jobs on friends’ PCs.
Trips to the store were always funny: I’d show up with a parent, but I did the talking. The salesperson would pitch to my mom or dad, and they’d just throw up their hands and let me negotiate. I’d pull out magazine ads and haggle like a pro:
“This store has the same controller for $27. You’re charging $32. Drop the price and I’ll buy it all here.”
They’d stare at a 13-year-old with wide eyes, but what could they do? I had the proof in hand, the leverage to walk out, and most times — I walked away with the deal.
— –
## ✍️ Closing Thoughts
From cracking open my mom’s 8088, to programming on the Apple IIe, to building and tuning 386s — this was the foundation of everything that came after. These early machines didn’t just run software. They **taught me hardware, coding, logic, and negotiation**.
This is just the first entry in *The Technomancer’s Tales*. More stories of resurrection, salvage, and silicon wizardry are yet to come.
