My first computer was an Olivetti PCS 286. I got it when I was ten, and I consider myself lucky for that. Even so, it probably wasn’t the best choice: there were cheaper and better machines. I had been asking the Three Kings, who bring the presents in Spain, for a computer since I was six. Thanks to my father and his hard work, I’m a programmer today.
We bought it in early 1990. I should say I had no idea about hardware, let alone software. If I had asked relatives and friends, I would probably have ended up with an Atari ST, or an Amiga 500 for a lot less. The computer was expensive. We had an Olivetti Studio 46 typewriter, which is probably why we chose Olivetti. I used it for 7 years. Given how fast computing moved back then, by 1997 it had more than paid for itself and was obsolete.
I got by with it. A month in, I bought a mouse and had no idea how to install it. I thought it would be like the one on my cousin’s Atari 1040STFM, which really was cool. I asked him for help, he set it up for me, and that’s when I realised it was useless in MS-DOS. Then I read the computer’s manual, the MS-DOS one, the GW-BASIC one, magazines and more books. I didn’t have many games or friends with a PC; almost everyone had a Spectrum, an Amstrad CPC or an Atari, and I think at first that was for the best.
Later I started getting hold of software: WordStar for DOS instead of the MS-DOS editor, programs from magazines, Centro Mail. I then found out that some friends already had a PC, and others bought one later: an Amstrad PC1512 and other clones. Floppy disks were flying around.
At the end of ’92 I bought a Sound Blaster Pro with my savings!!! It gave the computer a new lease of life.
I tried to upgrade to 2 MB and there was no way: the RAM was incompatible. That’s how I learned what parity was and why the memory I had bought didn’t work. Luckily I was able to return it.
In secondary school, when everyone was on Windows 95, I was squeezing everything out of Windows 3.1 with 1 MB of RAM!!!
In ’96 the hard disk started failing (a seized motor, a common fault on that Conner), and in the end the power supply died. In ’97 I bought another machine with my savings, a 486DX4 at 120 MHz, but that’s another story. The 286 was forgotten and eventually disappeared.
Quite a few years went by. It must have been around 2021 when I looked for an emulator. I found references to attempts in PCem and partial progress, nothing I could use.
And then a unit turned up on eBay
I tracked down a physical unit, repaired it, and for a while that was enough. Then came an Olivetti PCS 86 and a PCS 386SX. I was hooked again.
I was surprised to find so few Olivettis emulated, given how present the brand was in my memory. All my classmates’ machines were emulated, and some even had FPGA implementations.