486DX2-66 4MB RAM 250MB HDD 4x CD-ROM Sound Blaster 16

My brain issued lots of happy chemicals when I saw this illustration by Kevin Eric Raymundo AKA Kalbo.

A little kid in front of a 90s style computer with a monitor, speakers, and tower

Could be a popular setup for 90s kids but he might as well have found an old photo of our family computer setup: that entire frame, wheels, dot-matrix printer, 14" monitor, tower, mouse (with trackball), mouse pad with the edges lifted off slightly, a keyboard you could kill a wild boar with, boxy underpowered speakers, single CD-ROM and 3.5" disk drives.

Uncanny.

I love that the kid just turned it on and it’s the boot screen¹. Hours of fun and exploration are to follow. What a lovely time.

Unrelated but I also love this illustration of the Late Pope by the same artist 😇

Never knew what that “Energy Star” meant until I came to the US. Had to search for this to refresh my memory but: The blue guy is the Award Modular BIOS logo. There’s also this skipping COMMAND.COM thing I had to do to play Doom properly.↩︎