#pc Today's a special day: The 30-year anniversary of the launch of the IBM PC, a machine created for business that many of us soon discovered made a perfectly wonderful gaming machine. The PC wasn't my first gaming computer (that was a Radio Shack TRS-80), but it was certainly the one that turned me into a gamer. My little 286 wasn't much to look at, but she had it where it counted, and as Sierra adventure games gave way to mind-blowing cinematic simulations like Wing Commander and simple dial-up BBS board games like Trade Wars 2002 gave way to LAN and online gaming from the likes of DooM and Quake, I didn't even have time to appreciate how fast gaming was evolving on our husky spreadsheet machines. More »