My IT background came from my Dad who was at various points a DataComms specialist (Military secure Teletype systems), and Electrical Engineer, and Electronic Engineer, a Mainframe Engineer, a COBOL Programmer, and then he went into management and eventually Leadership Training. So, we always had IT kit at home ranging from a Wang Word Processor (size of a fridge) to various IBM, Honeywell, and DEC (PDP & VAX) Mini-Computers and eventually the inevitable X86 machines.
In my 20's, whilst working as an Electronics Tech in a college, I got dragged into maintaining the CAD computers (386's running AutoCAD) and learned the WinTel world pretty thoroughly through that. After that I worked as a PIC Programmer working with GPS and GSM systems and then got into doing Software Tech Support due to speaking French and being an accomplished trouble-shooter.
Personally I started my computing journey with a Sinclair ZX81 (Z80- BASIC & Machine Code), then a Sinclair QL (68008- BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL and C), then my first introduction to the WinTel world with a 286 running MSDOS 4.11 and later on 6.22 and Win 3.1.
By the time I replaced my home 286 it had 4MB RAM and was running EMM286 to manage the extra RAM and would run Wolfenstein 3D very well indeed and Doom adequately. That 4MB RAM required 102 separate chips to be fitted and took me hours!!
The advent of Quake made me upgrade to a 486 and since then it has been a long stream of upgrades and replacements until the current PCs.
Games PC - 7year old i7-4790, 16GB RAM, GTX960, 2TB SSD, 2TB HDD, 2x 32" monitors.
Garage PC - 15 year old Q9550 , 8GB RAM, GTX750Ti, 512GB SSD, 1TB HDD, 26" monitor.
Both run Win10 because it's what I use for the gaming PC and while I have played with Linux quite a bit it is no use for many games.
I also have a couple of old laptops and a few VMs that I use/play with from time to time, but less so these days as I spend all day working on a PC (Software Support for Radio-Oncology treatment systems) so in the evenings I don't really want to play with PCs.