The year was 1994, I had just learned to program in Pascal, I was doing quite well in my A-Level computing course and my parents bought my brother and I a PC... With "Support".
Yes, they forked out quite a whack of cash just months before the Pentium processor came out to buy us a machine powered by an Intel 80486SX2, which ran at 50 megahertz. It had 4 megabytes of RAM and a 200 megabyte hard drive, as well as a HDD floppy drive! I was in love with this thing, and I'm a little bit sad when I think about it's fate later on.
We bought this beast from Watford Electronics, it included at home support for a flat fee, I'm pretty sure Watford Electronics never expected this to be an issue, but it was.
We came to use this machine, daily, without really knowing much about it at the time, but a 50Mhz machine was blisteringly fast to us, it had an S3 Trio VGA graphics card in it too and came with WE's own ISA expansion card to add a custom CD-ROM drive, which they touted as being "Dual Speed"... aka slow or very slow.
This was all fine until 1995... Yes a whole year passed.
The few friends with PC's at home had Escom Pentium based machines, having waited to ask their most affluent parents for them that Christmas gone by, and so it was my brother and I played catch up.
Sure, I had all the beans in the bag with Turbo Pascal 7.0 for DOS and my learning more and more about computing, but games were where it was at.
The first title to show some issues was CivII, which I got for my birthday from a couple of friends. I loaded it up and it stuttered terribly on this machine; I know now that the bespoke card to link to the bus was the blame, it had no buffering and relied on the drive's throughput and this was too slow for the game. So despite our machine appearing on paper to be more than enough to play, it struggled terribly.
So much so that my mother decided to pack the whole thing up, including my game, and send it to Watford Electronics... I'm not sure what they did with the machine, but it arrived back behaving exactly the same way as it had before, it was sub par by design, they couldn't admit that, but by damn it they had described this machine as being Dual speed and fast enough, so it was by damn it going to be.
And it was such that on a festering hot day in 1995 an engineer arrived, a suited, briefcase carrying engineer... from Watford Electronics... Under the auspices of their repair warranty service arrived to see... What?
Well he saw two kids playing games. I think he expected an office or a school.
But no two kids and their sweaty sickly close bedroom, and he set about looking at the issues, and sure enough he agreed with us, grudgingly, but he agreed. And set about trying to sort things out.
He reinstalled the machine, no dice, it was just as slow doing the same tasks with the software reinstalled.
He fettled about with the settings; which I had already done; resulting in things getting even slower.
And in desperation of the perspiration he reached into his bag and pulled out a selection of options, the first was a sparkling Intel Pentium Overdrive chip, which would have overlain the socket 7 and boosted us immensely. I knew this was pretty damn expensive. But alas his hand waved over this and selected a 486 DX2-66Mhz, he set up the motherboard and rebooted.
Telling me something I'd not understood until this point... "The SX Chip you have doesn't do floating point maths, it's all integer based". A slight exaggeration, but about right, the SX was a DX which had failed certain tests, Intel had cut certain traces and so they sold the lower spec chip rather than writing off the failed DX in their ledger.
The DX2 however, only really made a difference in Doom... Which we played already, and it didn't make that much of a difference with the 66mhz to 50mhz jump being so small.
And so it was he reached once more to a different flap in his bag and he pulled out a tray - yes a whole tray - of 486DX4-100 chips... 100Mhz!...
Things ran like a dream then, even with his busting of my mobo jumper settings.
I pushed that chip to 114mhz on very rudimentary air cooling, and it worked well into the 2000's. I loved that chip, and we got it by bemoaning the system.
The system itself, with the proprietary Watford stuff in it eventually broke down, I had gotten into tower cases too, so the large desktop case of mostly air was left, the hard drive failed, and the machine was itself lost in body but never in spirit.
That 486DX4-100 chip stayed with me a long while, I had it until at least 2003, and in use.
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