Green monitors. I had an apple 2e that had a green monitor. I didn't know apple 2s could even output color until I was in elementary school and some of them had color monitors.

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My grandpa has about 7 large boxes of VHS tapes, then a few smaller boxes, then one of those common wooden tape racks that everyone has.

I watched a lot of movies when I was younger, so VHS tapes were really common. I still remember all kinds of things about VHS tapes, like the telephone dialing sound on some of then, the weird colored wavy lines you'd see in the beginning of many tapes during that period when you first hit play and it's all black. The old FBI warnings that you could still fast forward through normally. No stupid annoying LAGGY AS SHIT menus. I miss those days, and also think... they could've done much better with DVDs... Hell, just throw a filesystem on there and let the user pick the files they want to play. :p The menus don't need the language selection anyway since the players always had an AUDIO button anyway.

the 386sx I had up until ~1998. I don't remember it too much. It had Windows 3.1 and I was one of those people with too much time and interest in computers but lack of resources (no real internet connection, yet) and tended to screw up the windows installation by messing around with system files. I'd always also choose the most bizarre, random color schemes for no reason.

Oh, I guess I could count DOS because even back then it was beneficial to use the command line. I had a 233Mhz pentium 2 with windows 95 and explorer often took it's dear old time to display a file list, so using the DOS prompt was much faster, and I was usually aiming to load DOS programs anyway. I learned how to use basic DOS pretty early on. I had this old DOS manual that I read pretty extensively. I'd try to make stupid games in DOS batch files but never really got far. I mostly made ascii art animations and stuff that required you to press enter for each frame.

I had a lot of fun with QBASIC, but this was a bit later on. I think I started poking around with it when I was probably 11 but usually just made silly little input/print/if/for/etc programs with nothing too useful or functional... I remember the first decent program I made when I was probably 12 was a screensaver in the style of the matrix monitor screens in qbasic. It was really primitive and didn't work terribly well, and obviously badly written. Kinda pathetic that I was only working on simple shit like that when I was 12. I never made anything terribly great in it. When I was 14 or 15 I made a small game where you walked around in a house with a few rooms all on 1 screen and you could interact with a few things. It wasn't coded very well, but there's not exactly a whole lot you could do with qbasic, either.

I was doing a lot more things in Megazeux, anyway. Not a whole lot more, as far as technical stuff goes. Probably the most impressive thing I made was a basic raycaster when I was maybe 14, based upon my own experimentation. It sucked, though. It wasn't very fast, it didn't have textures, it didn't have sprites (including enemies and whatnot), and it had the fisheye distortion. This was also after a few people had already written a few, better ones, anyway. I'm kinda surprised that I did that, but it's really not very indicative of my abilities.

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