Game Criticism Time Machine is a weekly series where I find game criticism from more than a year ago, post an excerpt, and encourage you to read the piece.

That is the box which contains all of my earliest childhood gaming memories. See I have always lived with a computer. The same year I was born (1985) my father bought a brand new IBM compatible personal computer. No joke I learnt my ABCs from this thing because I had a game for that.  It wasn’t a 486, a 386 or even a 286, it was an IMB XT, the XT presumably stands for extreme.  It had two floppy 5 1/4 inch drives but no hard disk, so to get anything to work you needed to insert the DOS boot disk to load up the operating system and in the other drive insert the disk for the program you actually wanted to run. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know what an operating system was. These things have become coded into my soul.

Lyndon Warren, “My Own Personal Dark Age“

I love first person accounts of media archaeology and obsolescence.